By Marty Logan
QUEBEC CITY, Sep 22 2003 (IPS)

One hundred indigenous activists and their supporters from around the globe marched into the opening ceremony of the World Forestry Congress here Sunday to demand that governments recognise their rights to the planet’s natural resources.

The representatives had just finished a two-day meeting to discuss experiences and to shape a plan of action to present to the nearly 4,000 delegates who will meet for a week under the sponsorship of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO).

The action plan was still unfinished when the delegates from the Indigenous Peoples’ Forest Forum, a few wearing feather headdresses or brightly coloured traditional costumes, walked quietly from their downtown hotel along city streets the few blocks to the meeting hall.

But a draft left no doubt that Forum delegates did not want the document they were presenting to political leaders and forestry experts to become yet another inert declaration of principles.

"We have developed this action plan based on all those past declarations and action plans," it said. "The time for action is now. Our survival and the survival of our natural ecosystem depends on the recognition of our rights as indigenous peoples and on effective action."

Its main demand: "That the U.N., nation states and international multilateral organisations recognise and guarantee indigenous peoples’ self-determination as including the right to govern the use of natural resources and maintain the integrity of our ecosystems in accordance with their respective cosmo-visions".

"We don’t think that (the declaration) is going to be really finished by this year or the next," Victoria Tauli-Corpuz of the Philippines-based organisation Tebtebba told the Indigenous Forum.

"We’re all starting from the basic premise that we do have inherent rights to our territories, to our land," she added. ”We do have customary laws which have governed how we relate to these resources."

But "these have never been perceived nor respected by nation states," Tauli-Corpuz said.

She was scheduled to deliver a speech on indigenous issues to the Congress on Monday. In the audience will be 2,000 government officials, 1,000 researchers and hundreds of representatives from non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and the private sector worldwide.

During the week, delegates are scheduled to hear speakers at seven plenary sessions, participate in some 38 theme sessions, and then choose representatives for further talks at five roundtables representing the earth’s ecological regions.

Topics of the sessions vary from ‘Underlying Causes of Forest Degradation and Deforestation’ and ‘Urban Forestry, Trees Outside Forests’, to ‘Plantations: Threat to Biodiversity or Opportunities for Conservation?’.

On Wednesday, indigenous delegates will deliver their plan of action to the Congress, which has promised to incorporate its ideas into its deliberations. But that is only a start, according to Crescencio Resendiz-Hernandez from the Ottawa-based National Aboriginal Forestry Association, which helped organise the Indigenous Forum.

"Everyone who’s here knows that once we have the documents (written) we’ll have to go out and lobby for support from governments and NGOs. We want to make sure that we all go there with one voice," he said.

Indigenous activists are focusing increasingly on the actions of international bodies like the World Bank and World Trade Organisation (WTO).

Tauli-Corpuz told IPS that the WTO’s General Agreement on Trade and Services (GATS) would give private companies the right to bid for work in a country’s ”environmental services", including management of parks and other undeveloped land, territory that is often disputed by governments and indigenous peoples.

A survey of 27 multilateral development agencies earlier this year found only eight had specific policies on indigenous peoples, and only four of those included binding standards, Tom Griffiths of the Forest Peoples Programme told the Forum.

The policies of the eight organisations "are statements of value, but in practice, how do you hold, for example, the European Commission – which is the second biggest donor in the world – to account?" he asked.

"I came from a community where we fought against a World Bank-funded project, a dam project, and we stopped it, but not many indigenous peoples’ communities are in that state," Tauli-Corpuz told IPS.

"That’s why I wanted the World Bank to be (mentioned) here in the declaration, to say that they should really examine how they are implementing or formulating their policies insofar as they affect indigenous peoples."

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