Dormitory of indigenous girls of the Awajún people, in shelters where they live and receive intercultural bilingual education, in the province of Condorcanqui, state of Amazonas, in northeastern Peru. Credit: Courtesy of Rosemary Pioc

By Mariela Jara
LIMA, Jul 8 2024 (IPS)

The main fear facing women leaders who have denounced the systematic rape of girls from the Awajún indigenous people in the northeastern Peruvian department of Amazonas is that, despite the media coverage and sanctions announced by the authorities, it will all come to nothing.

“Our reports started in 2010 and the government has not acted to eradicate rapes against girls. We fear that once again there will be impunity, and the government is very strategic in this,” said Rosemary Pioc, president of the Awajún/Wampis Umukai Yawi (Comuawuy) Women’s Council, from the municipality of Condorcanqui, to IPS.

In June, women leaders from Comuawuy reported the rape of 532 girls between 2010 and 2024 in schools of Condorcanqui, one of the seven provinces of the department of Amazonas. These schools provide bilingual education to children and teenagers between the ages of five and 17.

Girls as young as five years old have died in these schools and shelters, infected with HIV/AIDS by their aggressors.

This is aggravated sexual violence against indigenous girls living in poverty and vulnerability, while sexual aggression against minors is on the rise in this South American country of 33 million inhabitants."I’ve picked up abused, bloodied girls, and I’ve listened to their despair when their parents paid no heed when told of the rapes": Rosemary Pioc.

According to the Ministry of Women and Vulnerable Populations, Peru registered 30,000 reports of sexual violence against children under 17 years of age in 2023.

However, many cases do not reach the public authorities due to various economic, social and administrative barriers, especially when rural populations or indigenous communities are involved.

Peru has 55 indigenous peoples, with a population of four million, living in the national territory since time immemorial, according to the Ministry of Culture database.

Four of these indigenous peoples live in Andean areas and 51 in Amazonian territories, including the Awajún people, who live in the departments of Amazonas, San Martín, Loreto, Ucayali and Cajamarca. However, 96.4% of the indigenous population are Andean peoples, mainly Quechua, and only 3.6% are Amazonian peoples.

Although national and international law guarantee their rights and identities, in practice this is not so for indigenous girls, while poverty and inequalities in access to education, health and food persist.

According to official 2024 figures, 30% of the national population lives in poverty. When differentiated by ethnic self-identification, this rises to 35% among those who learned a native language in childhood.

Extreme poverty reached 5.7%, a national average that rises to 10.5% in Amazonas, a department with more than 433,000 inhabitants, where indigenous families live mainly from agriculture, hunting, fishing and gathering wild fruits.

Rosemary Pioc, president of the Awajún/Wampis Umukai Yawi Council of Women. Credit: Courtesy of Rosemary Pioc

“I’ve picked up bloodied girls”.

Bilingual intercultural education is a state policy in Peru.

Thus, student residences were created to enhance access to education for indigenous children and teenagers living in remote communities, in the case of the province of Condorcanqui, on the banks of the Cenepa, Nieva and Santiago rivers.

The province hosts 18 residences, where the girls live throughout the year, receive meals and attend school.

“Since they cannot return home every day because they are hours or days away by river, the teacher or facilitator takes advantage of this situation and abuses them instead of guaranteeing their care,” said Pioc, herself a member of the Awajún people.

More than 500 rapes have been documented in the last 14 years in this scenario.

The leader explained that these shelters are licensed by the Ministry of Education, although they survive in very poor conditions and are left to their own devices.

Pioc has been denouncing sexual violence against her pupils for years, but the Local Educational Management Unit (Ugel), the Amazonas regional government’s decentralized body for education, has not addressed them in order to prosecute and dismiss the aggressor teachers.

Another dormitory in one of the bilingual intercultural schools where parents of the Awajún people, who live in remote areas along the banks of Peru’s Amazonian rivers, send their daughters between the ages of five and 17. Credit: Courtesy of Rosemary Pioc

“We are in the country of the upside down, because in 2017 a colleague and I were reported for denouncing and defending girls,” she said.

Pioc, as a native of Condorcanqui, knows her reality well. When she was a primary school teacher, she experienced terrible things. “I’ve picked up abused, bloodied girls, and I’ve listened to their despair when their parents paid no heed when told of the rapes”, she said.

She has left teaching to dedicate herself completely to Comuawuy, continue with the reports and prevent impunity.

“A headmaster touched two pupils. Their parents, with great effort, reported him to the Ugel, but nothing happened. He carried on with his contract and then raped his five-year-old niece. ‘Report me if you want. Nothing will happen to me’, he warned me. And so it was. I was the one prosecuted”, she complains.

A month ago, the indigenous women’s reports were widely heard when the Minister of Education, Morgan Quero, and the head of Women’s Affairs, Teresa Hernández, justified the events by attributing them to indigenous cultural practices.

The statements were roundly rejected by various sectors, deeming them racist and evasive of the government’s responsibility to sanction and prevent sexual violence.

Pioc decried the ministers’ statements and expressed her disbelief at the announcements of sanctions and other measures ordered by the Education Office. “They are setting up technical roundtables, but only when the rapists are in prison and the girls’ health has been taken care of will we say they have complied,” she said.

The two ministers later apologised and said they had been misunderstood, but they remain in their posts, despite many calls for their dismissal.

Genoveva Gómez, head of the Amazonas Ombudsman’s Office. Credit: Amazonas Ombudsman Office

Victims hurt for life

Genoveva Gómez, lawyer heading the Amazonas Ombudsman’s Office, says her sector reported in 2017, 2018 and 2019 the deprivation of student residences and flaws in the investigation of sexual violence cases at the administrative level and in the prosecutor’s office.

In order to correct this situation, her office has recommended “increasing the budget, strengthening the Permanent Commission for Administrative Proceedings, which is responsible for investigating teachers, and that cases that are time-barred at the administrative level should be referred to the Public Prosecutor’s Office because rape is a crime that has no statute of limitations,” she explained.

Gómez spoke to IPS as she travelled from Chachapoyas, also in the department of Amazonas and the headquarters of her organisation, to Condorcanqui, to take part in a meeting of the Coordination Body for the Prevention, Attention and Punishment of Cases of Violence Against Women and Family Members, convened by the mayor of that municipality.

The lawyer argued that the Awajún girls who have been sexually assaulted will be hurt for life and that it is urgent to implement mechanisms that guarantee justice, and emotional support for them and their families.

“As a society we must be clear that these acts violate fundamental rights and should not go unnoticed,” she stressed.

Gómez said that by August at the latest Condorcanqui will have a Gesell Chamber, a key means for the prosecutorial investigation in cases of sexual violence against minors to avoid re-victimisation through a single interview. The nearest one was in the city of Bagua Grande, a seven-hour car ride.

The chamber consists of two rooms separated by a one-way viewing glass. In one room, children and teenagers who are victims of rape and other sexual assaults talk about this violence with psychologists and provide information relevant to the case. In the other, family members, lawyers and prosecutors observe without being seen by the victim.

Afterwards, the psychologist in charge asks them about aspects requested by the observers. Everything is recorded and serves as valid evidence for the trial, and the victim does not have to testify in court.

Gómez also stated that access to justice has many barriers and it is up to the government to remove them so as not to send a message of impunity to the population, in particular to the Awajún girls.

She also welcomed the presence of representatives of the education sector in the area, but considered that this should not be a reactive work for a determined period of time, but rather a sustained and planned one that includes prevention.

In the small Aymara community of Visviri, in the extreme north of Chile, solar panels have bolstered camelid wool production in a project involving 120 inhabitants. With their traditional knowledge and the improved processes made possible by solar energy, they boosted their livestock activity and managed to increase the value of their fibers fivefold. CREDIT: Ayllu Solar

By Orlando Milesi
SANTIAGO, Aug 16 2021 (IPS)

Communities in Arica y Parinacota, the region in the extreme north of Chile, are using solar energy and are being empowered by projects for shrimp and trout farming, the production of yarn from camelid wool, the production of tomatoes and cheese, and even the sale of surplus solar power to the national electric grid.

Small rural and indigenous settlements in the Andes highlands and foothills and in coastal areas of northern Chile organised and boosted or modified their production and lowered costs by using energy from solar panels, thanks to a project that began in 2015 with an investment of 13.9 million dollars in human capital and implementation.

More than 320 panels with 100 kW of power were installed with the technical and financial support of the non-governmental organisation Ayllu Solar, bolstering productive capacity in Aymara and Quechua villages, in addition to lighting up the families’ homes.

The project aimed to create advanced human capital to promote sustainable development in one of the regions with the highest solar radiation potential in the world, which seeks to become Chile’s solar energy hub.

“Chile’s installed energy totals 28 GW and in Arica the estimated solar potential is 42 GW. There is enough energy there to supply all of Chile,” Rodrigo Palma, director of the University of Chile’s Energy Centre, told IPS.

The beneficiary communities in the Arica y Parinacota region are home to a total of 1,300 people and the project held 150 workshops to train them. The mainly arid altiplano and coastal region, which also has pampas grasslands, has a population of 220,000 people.

In the municipality of Camarones, 120 km south of Arica, the regional capital 2,000 km from Santiago, a facility was built to grow river shrimp and fatten trout, treating the water with solar radiation to remove arsenic using photochemistry.

“We started with a shrimp farming plant and added permanent trout production. Today we have 12, 000 trout raised from fry brought from the Andes,” Javier Díaz, president of the 24-member Solar Aquaculture Cooperative (Acuisol), told IPS by telephone.

“We took the shrimp fry from the river and are putting them in 20 pools, 1,000 in each. Ever since I was a boy I wanted to breed the local shrimp, endemic to the valley and prized for their quality,” he proudly explained from the half-hectare farm where Acuisol built breeding ponds and tanks.

“Restaurants are very interested and we already have contacts in Japan to export trout and shrimp,” he continued enthusiastically.

The community members involved in the Camarones project, who are part of the Solar Aquaculture Cooperative in the northern Chilean region of Arica y Parinacota, now hold a trout festival and a shrimp festival to celebrate the seafood that they raise in their pools and ponds, thanks to the solar energy installed on their fish farm. CREDIT: Ayllu Solar

Now they are seeking funds for a cold-storage plant. “We have made contributions and many are not in a position to contribute any more,” Diaz said.

“We use 99.9 percent of the water here. We treat it in a plant, take it through a coil that takes advantage of solar radiation and return it to the system thanks to solar energy,” he said.

He also announced new projects. “With the fecal waste we will make nutrients to grow hydroponic vegetables. And we want to make pellets, grow alfalfa and produce honey,” he explained.

Segundo Rafael Centella Sajama, president of the La Estrella de Ticnamar Aymara Indigenous Community, in the Andes foothills, said solar energy has been “fundamental”.

“We have a wonderful sun provided by our Tata Inti (father sun) practically all day long,” he told IPS on his 69th birthday.

“We started with 50 goats. Today we have 220, most of them young because we have dedicated ourselves more to breeding than to producing milk for cheese,” Centella Sajama said.

“We irrigate with sprinklers and electric motors at zero cost. We have an electric milking machine. It used to take my parents an hour and a half to milk five goats; today we milk 35 goats in 40 minutes,” he said from La Estrella, located 95 km from Arica.

“They suggested to me that we should plant three hectares of prickly pears, a fruit that does not need much water, and we did so. We also planted eight hectares of alfalfa and now we’re adding five more hectares,” Centella Sajama said.

Excited, he explained that in his community “the elderly and their children started to return and the community began to be repopulated. Today we are building houses, we have drinking water, electricity, modern irrigation, ponds and the best shed and the best dairy in the foothills.”

The ochre-coloured desert landscape is interruted by two rows of gray solar panels in a coastal area in the extreme north of Chile, just six km from Peru. Thanks to photovoltaic energy, the 80 small farmers of the Pampa Concordia Association were able to improve their horticultural production and bring it to the supermarkets of Arica, the regional capital. CREDIT: Ayllu Solar

Juan Carlos Cárdenas, president of the Pampa Concordia Association, which brings together 80 small farmers on the coast, said “solar packing” has improved their production of tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, cherry tomatoes and basil in ways they did not expect.

The community “solar packing” project established by Ayllu Solar included the technical planning, the sizing of the photovoltaic plant and the space required, together with the integral process of production and selection of tomatoes for collective commercialisation, supported by the new energy.

“We decided to form a cooperative and we picked up the projections of drought. One problem was to manage our marketing. Packing is a tool and it comes with a certificate and health regulations. We used to each be on our own,” he said.

“As a cooperative we were able to even become suppliers for supermarkets,” Cárdenas said, describing AgroConcordia‘s achievements.

The 80 participating families have 350 hectares, but “based on the availability of water, 120 hectares are in full production,” he said, explaining one of the chronic problems facing farmers in the area: access to water, which has worsened due to the drought.

In Visviri, 130 km from Arica, solar energy is used in a camelid – alpaca, llama and guanaco – wool collection and processing centre. The project aims to generate an opportunity for sustainable development and involves 120 inhabitants of one of the poorest rural municipalities in Chile: General Lagos, of which Visviri is the municipal seat.

Based on traditional Aymara knowledge, using solar energy and improving production processes, they have boosted livestock farming. Their success is reflected in the fact that they have managed to increase the value of their products fivefold.

In Altos de Azapa there are 41 beneficiaries of an on-grid solar panel system and an energy management programme. They recovered an abandoned 50 kWp photovoltaic plant, installed electrical conduits and obtained permits to connect it to the grid using the Distributed Generation Law (net billing), which allows the sale of surplus solar energy.

In Caleta Vitor, solar energy is used to process fruit and vegetable products from the Vitor and Chaca valleys, to which they add value through dehydration processing.

Ayllu means community

Ayllu Solar was an innovation initiative of the non-governmental SERC Chile (Chilean Solar Energy Research Centre), executed by the universities of Tarapacá, Chile and Antofagasta, with the support of the BHP Billiton Foundation, a Dutch mining company that is one of the largest in the world in the industry.

Education and sustainability were also priority areas in the initiative.

“Ayllu, which means community in Quechua and Aymara, aimed to create human capital to promote the sustainable development of rural and urban communities in Arica y Parinacota, through solar energy, in order to use science to improve the quality of life of local residents,” regional director Lorena Cornejo told IPS.

“For six years, six community production projects with replicable and scalable characteristics were developed and implemented in the region’s four communes (municipalities),” she said. “Sustainable energy solutions were created, using solar energy, which boosts their development and adds value to their products.”

“The communities played a key role in all phases of implementation,” noted Cornejo, who is also in charge of community-scale projects at the University of Tarapacá.

Ayllu’s regional director admitted to IPS that “the lack of resources to continue the initiatives could jeopardise the sustainability of the installations and the development of the communities.”

“There was not enough support due to the COVID pandemic; the villagers need periodic technical support,” she said.

To give them continuity, the Ayllu Solar Associative Network (RAAS) was created, which Cornejo represents and which is led by the University of Tarapacá in Arica.

“Base funding is required to continue supporting the projects implemented as well as initiatives proposed by new communities,” she said.

At the University of Tarapacá, in Arica, 27 students are earning a degree in Water and Solar Energy for Arid Zones, which draws on the experience of indigenous and peasant community members trained in the use of this energy source. In Chile, only two percent of photovoltaic energy is used in agriculture, but the sector’s costs could be reduced with the use of solar power, whose potential is enormous in the northern desert area of the country. CREDIT: Ayllu Solar

Cornejo said there are infinite alternatives to replicate the projects and “there is currently a portfolio of other productive development projects that could be implemented with solar energy support.”

“It will depend on the financing and the involvement of the state,” she said.

Rodrigo Palma believes that the Ayllu Solar projects can become widespread because they combine renewable energy with support for local productive activities in small communities.

“In the future, I see a virtuous combination of decentralised energy solutions in conjunction with large-scale solutions. These make it possible to reduce equipment, installation and maintenance costs. This virtuous combination is the one that should be growing,” he said.

Palma believes that what has been achieved with camelid wool can be applied to sheep, or in aquaculture, greenhouses, agricultural water pumping, water desalination, green hydrogen and other areas.

Meanwhile, Chile is banking on non-conventional renewable energies (NCRE), the use of which is expanding quickly in this long, narrow country nestled between the Andes mountains and the Pacific Ocean, with a population of 19.3 million.

In June, the installed capacity of the national electricity system was 28,000 MW, of which 9,869 MW (33.6 percent) came from NCRE. Of that portion, solar energy represented 4,905 MW (49 percent) and wind energy 3,699 MW (37 percent).

The enormous expansion of NCRE is clearly illustrated by the fact that they accounted for 442 MW in 2009 compared to 9,387 MW in 2021.

The Chilean Association of Renewable Energies and Storage (Acera) reported that in June, NCRE produced 23 percent of the power in the national grid, equivalent to 1,200 GW hour. That month, it commented that “Chile surpassed 10,000 MW of installed renewable energies.”

A small but valuable portion of these unconventional energies is changing the production and lives of hundreds of indigenous people and farmers in small communities in the extreme north of Chile.

Jam Bai (in red sari), a member of the Indigenous 'Kawar' community, sows rice saplings in her paddy field as her relatives and neighbours help her. After years of struggle she now officially owns the land she farms on. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
KORCHI/GADCHIROLI, India, Aug 9 2019 (IPS)

Jam Bai, an Indigenous farmer from Korchi village in western India, is a woman in hurry. After two months of waiting, the rains have finally come and the rice saplings for her paddy fields must be sown this week while the land is still soft.

But on Saturday Aug. 3, a day before IPS visited the village, government security forces shot dead seven armed rebels belonging to a far left, radical communist group called the ‘Maoists’ or ‘Naxals’ in a village 40 km from here.

Located roughly 750 km east of Mumbai in Maharashtra state’s Gadchiroli district, which has one of the India’s thickest teakwood forests, the area is often in the news for the violent incidents such as landmine blasts, killing, gunfire, arrests and protests that occur here. Maoists have been waging war against the government for over a decade here as they demand a classless society.

Since the incident, there has been an unofficial shutdown around Korchi. As tension and fear spreads, Bai could not find a single labourer to hire. But the 53-year-old will not give up: not sowing the fields this season is not an option.

Her reasons are not only financial but also emotional.

After years of struggle she now officially owns the land.

So today Bai has called on several of her women relatives and friends from the village. With saris pulled up over their knees and heels dug into the muddy water, they bend in a row, holding a bundle of saplings in one hand, while sowing a small bunch with the other.

“I have five acres of land. So far we have finished sowing about one acre. There are four more to go, but we will surely finish the rest in two to three days,” says Bai. The women laugh and cheer for her.

• The village of Korchi consists of just over 3,000 people, most of whom are small and marginal farmers belonging to Gondi and Kawar Indigenous communities, who recognised by the country’s constitution as ‘Schedule Tribes’—the official term for Indigenous peoples in the country.
• The area may be conflict-ridden but studies show that the district stands as being the first in all of India to grant land rights to Indigenous people. Much of this is credited to local Indigenous women like Bai who have been leading a ground movement for years for formal ownership of both the farming land and the forest land.

The paddy fields that Bai owns are located at the edge of a her village, beyond which lies a forest. For generations, Bai’s family has sustained itself both by farming on the land and collecting fruit, tree bark, vegetables and herbs that grow in the forest, just like other members of their Indigenous communities.

But they never possessed official rights over either of the land areas.

It was only after the government started to implement the Forest Rights Acts 2006—a new law which recognised the rights of the Indigenous peoples living in the forest—that Bai applied for formal ownership to the land her family held. Finally, after nearly a decade’s struggle, she received her land rights last year.

“Before me, my mother in law and her mother in law also sowed rice in this land. But 15-20 years ago, everyone started to say, ‘this land belongs to government, you are only occupying it’. That is when we realised that we need formal rights and ownership. After the new forest law came, along with others, I also applied in 2008 for my rights. Finally, last year I received my Patta (ownership certificate),” she says. 

A woman shows an application for individual landrights and the documents that are required. This includes maps and receipts of the land tax paid to the district government by the family for past three generations, multiple signatures of the applicant, their family members, the village chief, and senior government officials at the Land and Revenue department etc., several rounds of verification by village and district level officials. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

Land ownership for women: a complex story

Kumaribai Jamkatan, 51, is one of those leaders who have been fighting for women’s land rights since 1987.

• Though the constitution of India grants equal rights to men and women, women first started to stake their claim for formal ownership of land only after 2005–the year the government accorded legal rights to daughters to be co-owners of family-owned land.
• For the Indigenous communities, it was the Forest Rights Act 2006 which allowed women to own land.
• Presently, the Indigenous people here in Korchi have two kinds of land rights:
  • The rights of an individual over farmland in their village, and
  • A collective right over a specific area in the forest for hunting-gathering – which was made possible in 2006 under a special forest law (The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act).

Under this law, the entire community shares the forest resources of barks, seeds, fruit and vegetables, which include; gooseberries, blackberries, mushrooms, bamboo shoots, soap nuts, and various herbs and shrubs. All of these have been part of the Indigenous communities’ diets and source of their livelihood for generations.

• The land allotted to a village community is typically decided by the size of the village population. However, it usually falls between four to 10 acres.
• But their struggle for land rights started decades ago and continues today as many women are still waiting to receive land rights due to slow pace of implementation of Forest Rights Act and lack of awareness in their communities. According to India’s Agriculture Census 2010-2011, nationally, women own only 10.34 percent of land.

The struggle has been long and hard with social, financial and legal challenges, Jamkatan says.

“In the beginning, nobody even believed in the individual land rights of women. Some saw it as a huge work burden as the land is usually in the name of the patriarch of the family and granting ownership to women would mean distributing the land to individual family members.

“Then there are legal challenges: the application needs several documents, including maps and receipts of the land tax paid to the district government by the family for past three generations, multiple signatures of the applicant, family members, the village chief, and senior government officials at the Land and Revenue department etc., several rounds of verification by the village and the district level officials and goes through several government agencies all of which take a long time,” says Jamkatan.

In 2017, locals, supported by a local NGO, Amhi Amchya Arogyasathi (We for our own health in Marathi), formed the Maha Gram Sabha (the Great Village Assembly). The assembly is a community-based organisation with members from 90 Indigenous villages of the district’s 125 villages. Gadchiroli district is at least nine times the size of London, with a total population of about 1.7 million.

The Great Village Assembly has not only spearheaded the land rights movement of women in a collective manner, but also asserted their rights to the forests and its resources. About 3,000 women are reported to have received land rights since the assembly was formed.

The assembly believes that Indigenous people have the first right to land and forest. When this is ensured, the community has a better life and the forest also flourishes, Nand Kishore Wairagade, a former village chief and now an advisor to the assembly, tells IPS.

Wairagade says the formation of the Great Village Assembly helped revolutionise people’s rights over the land: “There are 90 villages in this assembly who meet regularly and decide on everything from applying for land rights to collecting forest resources like Tendu leaves (a significant source of income for the forest peoples which is used to make hand-rolled cigarettes), gooseberry, mushroom etc. The assembly also oversees the sale of Tendu leaves, negotiates its price with the buyers and ensures that the money is paid directly to bank accounts of the women sellers.”

These have all been hard-won gains.

“We have taken to the road many times. Since 2012, when the government first decided to grant us the collective rights, we have held protest rallies, sit-in demonstrations, road blockades and strikes. Finally, last year they started to distribute the certificates again. Now, people in 77 villages (out of the 90 villages that are part of the assembly) have land ownership but people in 13 villages are yet to receive theirs,” says Jamkatan who is pursuing a personal goal of helping 1,000 women get land rights this year.

Indigenous people’s land–what experts say

Global experts have emphasised how land use by Indigenous peoples plays a role in conserving the environment and mitigating climate change. A special report on Land and Climate Change released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on Thursday, Aug. 8, highlights how indigenous and traditional ways of managing land can help reverse land degradation and mitigate climate change in the process.

Commenting on the report, Andrea Takua Fernandes, frontline organiser for Indigenous communities at 350.org, tells IPS the leadership of the Indigenous people is key to addressing both the climate crisis and deforestation. “The biodiversity defended by Indigenous people will be essential to cracking the code of how to respond sustainably and fairly to the climate breakdown.”

In Korchi village, Wairagade shares an example of how Indigenous people use land in a sustainable manner: “the community here knows exactly how much to take from the forest. Their need is not driven by market and profits, but meeting the need of the family. When they harvest bamboo shoots, they take only a few to feed themselves and leave enough in the wild, so that the forest can be regenerated. So, sustainability is in our culture.”

No land rights, no empowerment of women
Sarajaulabai Ganesh Sonar, a smallholder farmer in Korchi who owns three acres of land which she was officially awarded the title deed to last year, believes that without land ownership, women’s empowerment is incomplete.

She tells IPS that previously women were too scared to demand their share of land.

“Now they see it as a fight for their own identity. [A woman] can also earn a living from her own land. In the forest also, before we had collective rights, we used to be scared of the forest guards and think ‘what if he caught us and beat us etc’. Now we don’t have to sneak in and hide. So, for us, land is our real source of empowerment.”

Excerpt:

By Stella Paul
KORCHI, India, Aug 9 2019 (IPS)

Excerpt:

Over the past two decades, 99 percent of India’s vultures have disappeared. Credit: gkrishna63/CC-BY-ND-2.0

By Stella Paul
PYEONGCHANG, Republic of Korea, Oct 16 2014 (IPS)

The Mountain Chicken isn’t a fowl, as its name suggests, but a frog. Kimisha Thomas, hailing from the Caribbean island nation of Dominica, remembers a time when she could find these amphibians or ‘crapaud’ as locals call them “just in the backyard”.

Known also as the Giant Ditch Frog, these creatures form a crucial part of Dominica’s national identity, with locals consuming them on special occasions like Independence Day. Today, hunting mountain chicken is banned, as the frogs are fighting for their survival. In fact, scientists estimate that their numbers have dwindled down to just 8,000 individuals.

Locals first started noticing that the frogs were behaving abnormally about a decade ago, showing signs of lethargy as well as abrasions on their skin. “Then they began to die,” explained Thomas, an officer with Dominica’s environment ministry.

“People also started to get scared, fearing that eating crapauds would make them ill,” she adds. In fact, this fear was not far from the truth; preliminary research has found that Chytridiomycosis, an infectious disease that affects amphibians, was the culprit for the wave of deaths.

Some 2,599 of 71,576 species recently studied are thought to be endangered -- International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN)
Besides the mountain chicken, there has been a sharp decline in the population of the sisserou parrot, which is found only in Dominica, primarily in the country’s mountainous rainforests. Thomas says large-scale destruction of the bird’s habitat is responsible for its gradual disappearance from the island.

Dominica is not alone in grappling with such a rapid loss of species. According to the Red List of Threatened Species, one of the most comprehensive inventories on the conservation status of various creatures, some 2,599 of 71,576 species recently studied are thought to be endangered.

Compiled by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the Red List aims to increase the number of species assessed to 160,000 by 2020. But even with only half the world’s biological species included in the index, the forecast is bleak.

While the extinction or threat of extinction of thousands of species poses huge challenges across the board, tribal and indigenous communities are generally first to feel the impacts, and will likely bear the economic and cultural brunt of such losses.

As Thomas points out, “The crapaud was our national dish. The sisserou parrot [also known as the Imperial Amazon] sits right in the middle of our national flag. Their loss means the loss of our very cultural identity.”

A similar refrain can be heard among the Parsi community of India, whose culture dictates that the dead be placed in high structures, called ‘towers of silence’, that they may be consumed by birds of prey: kites, vultures and crows. The unique funeral rites are an integral part of the Zoroastrian faith, which stipulates that bodies be returned to nature.

But over the past two decades, 99 percent of India’s vultures have disappeared, making it impossibly difficult for the Parsi community to keep up with a centuries-old tradition.

Rising economic burden

Besides severely affecting ancient cultural and spiritual practices, the disappearance of various species is also taking an economic toll on indigenous communities according to 65-year-old Anil Kumar Singh, who was born and raised in the village of Chirakuti in India’s northeastern hill districts.

Singh says that as a child, he never saw a doctor for minor ailments like the common cold or an upset stomach.

“We used Vishalyakarni [a herb] for pains and cuts. We drank the juice of basak leaves (adhatoda vasica) for a cough and used the extract from lotus flowers for dysentery,” he tells IPS.

“But today, these plants don’t grow here anymore. Even when we try, they die out soon and we don’t know the reason. We now have to buy medicines from a chemist’s shop for everything,” he asserts.

Sometimes, the cost is much higher. Northern Indian states like Haryana and Uttar Pradesh have experienced an explosion in the population of stray dogs, giving rise to health risks among locals.

By way of explanation, Neha Sinha, advocacy and policy officer of the Bombay Natural History Society in India (BNHS), a Mumbai-based conservation charity, tells IPS that the phenomenon of increasingly feral dogs can be traced to Indian farmers’ practice of leaving dead cattle out in the open to be consumed by birds of prey.

With no vultures to pick the beasts clean, dogs are now getting to the carcasses, growing more and more vicious and resorting to attacks on humans. BNHS is currently breeding vultures in captivity in order to prevent their complete extinction, but it is unlikely the birds will regain their numbers from 20 years ago.

Meanwhile, according to a study by Birdlife International, the population of feral dogs in India has grown by 5.5 million due to the disappearance of vultures.

The report says there have been “roughly 38.5 million additional dog bites and more than 47,300 extra deaths from rabies, [which] may have cost the Indian economy an additional 34 billion dollars.”

Legal and knowledge gaps

The near extinction of vultures in India is attributed to diclofenac, a painkiller that is often given to cows and buffalos to which vultures are allergic. Intense campaigning against use of the drug led to a government ban in 2004, but implementation of the law has been poor, and diclofenac is still widely used, according to Singh of BNHS.

“The farmers know [the drug] is banned but they continue to use it because the law is not being enforced,” she said.

In several other cases, communities are left confused as to the reasons behind species loss, making it increasingly hard to settle on a solution. For instance, even after a decade of seeing their unique creatures vanish, Dominica still does not know what brought the Chytridiomycosis fungus to their soil, or how to deal with it.

This knowledge gap is a double whammy for indigenous communities, whose lives and livelihoods depend heavily on the species they have lived side by side with for millennia.

Lucy Mulenekei, executive director of the Indigenous Information Network (IIN), tells IPS on the sidelines of the 12^th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP 12), currently underway in Pyeongchang, South Korea, that the decline in the livestock population in Kenya has affected the Maasai people, a pastoral tribe that has always relied on their herds for sustenance.

Now forced to live off the land, the tribe is faltering.

“The Maasai people don’t know what kind of farming tools they need, or how to use them. They don’t know what seeds to use and how to access them. There is a huge gap in knowledge and technology,” explains Mulenekei, who is Maasai herself.

In response to the growing crisis, governments and U.N. agencies are pushing out initiatives to tackle the problem at its root.

Carlos Potiara Castro, a technical advisor with the Brazilian environment ministry, is leading one such project in the Bailique Archipelago, 160 km from the Macapa municipality in northern Brazil, where local fisher communities are taught to conserve biodiversity. Already, community members have learned the properties of 154 medicinal plants.

The annual cost of the project is about 50,000 dollars, but Potiara says a lot more funding will be needed in order to scale up the work and replicate such efforts around the country.

This might soon be possible under a new initiative launched by the government of Germany together with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Global Environment Facility (GEF), which offers 12.3 million euros over a period of five years to indigenous communities in over 130 countries to help them conserve protected areas.

Yoko Watanabe, a senior biodiversity specialist at the natural resources team of the GEF Secretariat, tells IPS the grants will also cover the cost of trainings, to pass on necessary skills to indigenous communities who are recognised as “indispensable to biodiversity conservation.”

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Local communities in India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands (ANI) have grown accustomed to modern water and sanitation infrastructure in the decade since the Asian Tsunami. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

By Malini Shankar
CAR NICOBAR, India, Sep 5 2014 (IPS)

When the 2004 Asian Tsunami lashed the coasts and island territories of India, one of the hardest hit areas were the Andaman and Nicobar Islands (ANI), which lie due east of mainland India, at the juncture of the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea.

Remote and isolated, the tribal communities that occupy these idyllic isles have lived for centuries off the land, eschewing all forms of modern ‘development’ and sustaining themselves off the catch from the rich seas that surround them.

But when the tsunami struck without warning on Boxing Day, and traditional wooden houses erected on bamboo stilts were washed away, surviving commuties scattered across these islands have been forced to reckon with their primitive lifestyle and open the doors to some changes, especially in Car Nicobar, capital and administrative nerve-centre of the Nicobar Islands.

One of the most notable changes has been in the realm of sanitation, hitherto an unhealthy mix of open defacation and forest-based waste management.

Before a major relief and rehabiliation operation got underway in the aftermath of the tsunami, many tribal communities in Nicobarese villages had rejected potable water schemes such as the desalination plant installed in the village of Chaura, where the population of 1,214 people expressed hesitation about drinking water “from a machine”.

Toilet facilities were also extremely limited, with most residents “answering nature’s call by going behind a bush”, according to a sports ministry official from the division of Kakana who gave his name only as Benedict.

When IPS visited an interim tsunami shelter in Kakana, Car Nicobar, in 2007, 25 months after the tsunami, the situation had scarcely improved. A hole in the ground across from the relief shelter served as a communal facility, and could only be accessed by leaping onto a mound of dug-up earth and navigating the moist forest floor, hoping to avoid an encounter with snakes en route to the bathroom.

The ‘structure’ consisted of nothing more than a deep hole in the forest floor, covered on all four sides by plastic sheeting. It lacked a roof, a tap and a light.

Locals were still trying to come to terms with the fact that their freshwater supply, once a boundless natural bounty originating from springs in the volcanic islands, had become badly polluted after the natural catastrophe.

A World Health Organisation (WHO) report on sanitation prospects on the island in early 2005 found several cases of diarrhoeal outbreak among survivors housed in temporary camps, which affected hundreds of the roughly 1,300 residents.

Now, most villages have toilets and sanitation systems in individual homes, and locals are slowly opening up to the necessity of improved waste-management systems. IPS interviewed tsunami survivors across five Nicobar islands – Car Nicobar, Kamorta, Campbell Bay, Little Nicobar, and Katchall – who expressed the universal opinion that receiving access to water and sanitation facilities, as well as permanent shelters designed and constructed by the government of India, has done them good.

“There are a few issues like water scarcity and discomfort in the humid summer months,” said 46-year-old Muneer Ahmed, chief tribal captain in Pilpillow, Kamorta. “Zinc sheet roofing and concrete houses are tough as they are weather insenstive, compared to weather-sensitive straw huts.”

“But,” he told IPS, “We are grateful for greater security.” His words reflect a prevailing attitude across the islands that returning to flimsy thatched-roof homes – despite their proximity to the beach, which most Nicobarese depend on for sustenance – is simply not an option with the memory of the killer waves still fresh in the minds of the survivors.

The same holds true for water and sanitation. Local communities now get water from infrastructure provided by the Public Works Department, Sakshi Mittal, deputy commissioner of Nicobar, told IPS, adding, “They don’t reject this supply anymore.”

Coastal fisherfolk in Tamil Nadu’s tsunami battered coasts of Nagapatnam and Cuddalore are also benefiting from similar schemes, many of them overseen by the Swiss Development Agency. “We have tiled bathrooms with ventilation and western toilets with bidets,” a fisherwoman named Vanitha in Nagapatnam told IPS.

Such developments among fisher communities are crucial as the international community finalises a new roadmap for sustainable development that will replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2015.

Key among the new poverty eradication targets, known as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), will be the inclusion of the most marginalised segments of society.

In India, this includes fisher communities who were the worst hit in Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry, with about 150,000 fisherfolk losing their homes to the tsunami. In ANI, close to 10,000 people lost their lives and and scores more were exposed to tough living conditions.

Despite construction by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) of 8,500 latrines around the islands after the tsunami, there remains a 35 percent deficit of decent sanitation facilities today.

In general, health indicators among the islands’ tribal population are higher than in other parts of India, with a maternal mortality ratio far below the national average of 250 deaths per 100,000 live births.

Although other health indicators like life expectancy rates were higher in the states of Kerala and ANI (67.6 percent and 73.4 percent respectively), the tsunami brought fresh new troubles, such as fears of malaria outbreaks, or epidemics of vector-borne diseases like dengue.

Relief workers and emergency response teams, sponsored by the government, international NGOs and the United Nations, took the lead on eradicating mosquito breeding grounds, distributing bednets, spraying insecticide in mosquito-heavy areas, as well as stocking local water bodies with a species of fish with an appetite for mosquito larvae.

According to a WHO assessment a year after the tsunami, Indian health authorities also launched measles vaccinations campaigns in the areas hardest hit by the disaster, namely the state of Tamil Nadu and the union territory of ANI, boosting measles immunisation coverage to 96.3 percent in the latter.

While they hope against hope to be spared another disaster, some of India’s most vulnerable communities are today far more resilient than they were a decade ago.

Part 1 of this series can be read here.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Excerpt:

By Manipadma Jena
KORAPUT, India, Jan 29 2013 (IPS)

While tens of thousands of Indian farmers succumb to the pressures of debt, hunger and poverty by taking their own lives, members of the Bhumia tribe are simply falling back on a 3,000-year-old agricultural system to ensure a steady supply of healthy food.

Located in the eastern state of Odisha’s Koraput province, the tribe utilises sustainable farming practices to counter the impacts of deforestation and climate change.

Using local seeds from the Eastern Ghats, a discontinuous mountain range that runs parallel to the Bay of Bengal along India’s eastern coast at an average of 900 metres above sea level, farmers here plant “mixed” crops, barter their produce at the local market and save their traditional seeds.

Last year, the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) accorded the status of Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System (GIAHS) to the traditional agricultural system in the Koraput region. The status grants farmers the support they need to continue to nurture and adapt their ancient practices.