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Innabuyog’s 5th regional congress

Innabuyog is proud to share the gains that it consolidated in its 5th regional congress held last October 19-20, 2005 in Baguio City. Innabuyog grew from 98 member-organizations in May 2003 to 124 women formations as reported by the provincial chapters in Abra, Benguet, Kalinga, Apayao and Mountain Province and its urban chapter in Baguio. The urban chapter composes the different sectoral organizations from women workers, urban poor communities, youth and students, professionals in the public and private sectors, lesbians and migrant workers. The provincial chapters are composed mainly of indigenous peasant women, which are found in 100 communities.

One of the new organizations, which affiliated with Innabuyog, is the Timpuyog ti Babbai iti Minasan ti Lepanto (TBML), an organization of wives of Lepanto workers who actively participated in the 3-month strike of Lepanto mineworkers.

Most of Innabuyog’s new members come from the ranks of indigenous peasant women in the provinces with some increase in urban poor communities and from the ranks of women professionals in Baguio.

The 5th regional congress adapted 8 regional resolutions — on land, food and rights as the focus of the Innabuyog’s women rights campaign for the next two years; intensify actions to call for PGMA’s ouster, to oppose imperialist mining in the Cordillera; continued resistance against the WTO-globalization and active participation towards the derailment of the 6th Ministerial Meeting of the WTO in Hong Kong in December 2005, stop human rights violations in the Cordillera, support to the struggles of migrant workers and their families in upholding their rights and welfare, organizing of lesbians to address the issue of homophobia, support to Gabriela Women’s Party and expand its chapters in the Cordillera.

The delegates also adopted the resolution of BIDANG, the Innabuyog chapter in Abra against large and destructive mining and militarization in the province as both are a big threat to food production, livelihood and security of women and their communities.

Land, food and rights were taken as the focus of the women rights campaign of Innabuyog in the light of the increasing aggression of the state and corporations especially from the mining and energy industry. Innabuyog is convinced that the state and capitalists will not give up their economic interest on the remaining resources of the region. This intensified economic aggression will surely aggravate hunger, poverty and violence against women. Violations on individual and collective rights are expected to worsen when women and their communities will rise up to defend their basis for survival. State terrorism will be used, as it is now, in the name of national interest.

Innabuyog upholds its position that WTO and globalization has only increased hunger, poverty and displacement of women. Even women from the interiors who hear little about WTO cry of the impact of trade and agricultural liberalization and the absence of basic social services. Their remaining sources of livelihood are being ruined by the influx of cheap imported products, increasing need for cash capital and absence of market for the goods they worked hard to produce. Ten years of WTO was ten years of hunger, poverty and displacement for many women in the Cordillera especially among indigenous peasant women. Thus, Innabuyog reaffirms the call to junk WTO and will join people’s actions all over the world to derail the 6th ministerial meeting in Hong Kong this December. Innabuyog has prepared a RAGAS, a quilt of women’s slogans against against WTO and GMA’s administration, which will be sewn together to patches of resistance that other women in Asia led by the Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development, have prepared against the WTO.

Innabuyog will continue to be at the forefront of an alternative women’s movement in the Cordillera that truly upholds the rights and welfare of women and children in the context of an advancing people’s struggle for self-determination, national freedom and democracy. We will persevere in the struggle for land, food and rights. #

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