Delegates representing Indigenous communities urge negotiators to include language that promotes human and environmental rights. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

By Joyce Chimbi
BAKU, Nov 19 2024 (IPS)

Delegates representing Indigenous people’s rights have taken issue with the ongoing COP29 negotiations, calling for Parties to include text and language that promote Indigenous rights to be explicitly referenced in the consensus and outcome documents.

Faced by multiple, complex challenges, they want legal, socio-political and economic barriers removed to enable Indigenous communities to lead meaningful lives with all the tools necessary to address the climate change crises. They especially want respect and promotion of their human rights and rights to land and natural resources to which they have been connected for millennia.

Prince Israel Orekha from Connected Advocacy for Empowerment and Youth Development during the interview. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

“I’m from the Indigenous community of the Niger Delta and climate change is a reality for us. We are seeing the extinction of our local foods and agricultural and medicinal products and a dangerous rise in the sea level. We are losing our ancestral lands and resources and this means us losing our lifeline,” Prince Israel Orekha from Connected Advocacy for Empowerment and Youth Development during the interview told IPS.

“In my community, we are predominantly farmers, but dependence on fossil fuels in the Global North has negatively affected our farmlands and season after season, we are losing more and more farm yields. Our days are filled with worries and our life expectancy has reduced to 42 percent. We need an outcome that will give us a fresh start and an environment from which to draw clean breath and meaningful livelihoods. Let us breathe.”

Orekha said Indigenous people from the Global South are in a more disadvantaged position and too disenfranchised to mount an effective war against climate change. Stressing the need for localization of climate action so that all people everywhere can significantly contribute to and push forward effective climate action. 

“Today, we are here to speak in one voice and say that Indigenous people should be included in all meaningful ways. And part of that is to ensure that people and places where Indigenous people represent them must also feature prominently in those economies and in all aspects of life. So, we should not be sidelined and the wisdom that we have with us, passed down through generations, could make a difference in designing workable climate solutions and yet, we have been left out of decision-making tables,” he said.

Stressing that the marginalization of Indigenous people “is astounding and counterproductive, especially because we are the frontline communities. We bear the brunt of climate change. Policies and programs must be inclusive and promote equity and justice. We remain excluded but hopeful that, at last the spell will be broken, and there will be something substantive for us at COP29 Baku.”
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Members of Dominica’s Kalinago community, the largest indigenous group in the Eastern Caribbean, on a tour with government officials at a recent event in the Kalinago Territory. Courtesy: Alison Kentish

By Alison Kentish
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 23 2020 (IPS)

The picturesque Mahuat River in Dominica is one of 8 communities that make up the Kalinago Territory – a 3,700-acre area on the Caribbean island’s east coast that is home to the Kalinago people, the largest indigenous group in the Eastern Caribbean. It is where 19-year-old Whitney Melinard calls home. Melinard is among a rising group of Dominica’s Kalinago youth, using their voices and platforms to speak out on issues affecting their people.

The Kalinago people have a chief and a representative in the House of Assembly, but some of their longstanding concerns mirror those of other indigenous groups, who for the first time have a say in a major biodiversity framework that is expected to be signed by 190 countries next year. This week, indigenous leaders from Asia, the Artic, Latin America and the Caribbean met virtually to discuss the outcomes of a Dec. 1-3 meeting on the post-2020 biodiversity plan, which will guide protection of animals, plants and vital ecosystems for the next ten years. The leaders want concrete action to respect traditional knowledge at the center of the plan, something leaders committed to ensuring over the last ten years, but failed to do. For Kalinago youth like Melinard, this call is urgent.

“Governments must work with us to protect and preserve the natural environment by firstly acknowledging and respecting that fact the indigenous peoples around the globe have always resided in perfect harmony with mother nature. With this in mind, we need strengthened collaboration and consultation between their agencies and our community especially when making decisions that will affect our environment. By so doing, the Kalinagos will be able to contribute to the decision-making process,” Melinard told IPS.

Indigenous people live where 85 percent of the world’s biodiversity is located and the leaders say it is therefore critical that they are part of any major conservation plan. Senior Policy Advisor of the Forest Peoples Programme, Joji Carino says the international community has failed to deliver on some key promises of the 2011-2020 Strategic Plan of the Convention of Biological Diversity, particularly provisions to integrate traditional knowledge, innovations and practices of indigenous communities in conservation and sustainability initiatives. She says the world cannot afford to get the new framework wrong.

“A common message is that global biodiversity targets have not been met, with abundant evidence about how our current systems are unravelling the Earth’s support systems. The target on traditional knowledge was similarly unmet, with only ten percent of parties reporting inclusion in the national biodiversity strategies and action plans,” she said. 

Indigenous leaders say their people continue to fight for land rights as they face displacement due to activities such as mining and development. They say the COVID-19 pandemic presents an ideal time to reflect on interconnectedness and approach biodiversity from a resilience-based, indigenous-inclusive perspective. 

In an interview with IPS, international public lawyer and Indigenous Peoples’ rights expert Viviana Figueroa said she is optimistic about the way forward. She says the world is recognising the contribution of indigenous people as guardians of the natural world. She warns however that while traditional knowledge is critical to saving the planet, indigenous rights must be respected. 

“Target 19 (of the post-2020 framework) is saying that indigenous people should make traditional knowledge available for policy makers and the public and we’re saying traditional knowledge is not in the public domain. It is held by indigenous people and can only be accessed if there is an agreement to share this knowledge,” she said, adding “at the same time we are losing our traditional knowledge because of conflicts and destruction of nature and we need a commitment from countries to support us to maintain and transmit this knowledge. Thanks to this knowledge we can conserve and protect the forests. Many of our brothers and sisters have lost their lives in the protection of nature.”

The leaders say in indigenous people continue to be characterised as backward. They argue that respected for their people should also include land rights and are calling on governments to make secure land tenure a reality for them. For some indigenous communities, living on communal leads to displacement from their ancestral homes. For the Kalinago in Dominica, land ownership could bring access to more opportunities for security and upliftment.

“Having land titles would place every single Kalinago on a level playing field with majority of other Dominicans. A land title can lead a Kalinago to become economically independent, by either investing in a business or to access financing to pursue educational goals. This can be done while maintaining the integrity of our space,” Melinard told IPS. 

The Post-2020 Biodiversity Framework is based on the premise that urgent action is needed globally ‘to transform economic, social and financial models, so that the trends that have exacerbated biodiversity loss will stabilise in the next 10 years and allow for the recovery of natural ecosystems in the following 20 years, with next improvements by 2050 to achieve the vision of living in harmony with nature by 2050.’ Indigenous leaders like Joji Carino, the goals are necessary and attainable, but not in the absence of the indigenous community.

“So from the evidence, it shows that unless indigenous peoples are empowered and our knowledge truly respected, meaning to say we’re also at the table when, for example, development plans or spatial planning is happening, then we will go down the road of business as usual.”

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Even the Afar can be shy: Here a young Afar woman consents to be photographed, though only after covering part of her face. Afar women often have intricate frizzed and braided hairstyles, and wear bright coloured bead necklaces, heavy earrings and brass anklets. Many Afar women cover their heads in public. This helps ward off the relentless sun. At the same time, the vast majority of Afar are Muslim. Despite Afar’s ancient trade links with the Christian highlands to the west, Islam was widely practiced in the region as early as the 13th century. Credit: James Jeffrey/IPS

By James Jeffrey
ADDIS ABABA, Mar 6 2019 (IPS)

Once made infamous through explorers’ tales of old, Ethiopia’s remote northeast Afar region both conforms to and contradicts stereotypes.

Tough neighbourhood: Ethiopia’s remote northeast Afar region contains the Danakil Depression—the hottest place on earth where temperatures in the naked plains frequently soar above 50 degrees centigrade, exacerbated by the fierce blowing of the Gara, which translates as Fire Wind. Such inhospitable conditions haven’t stopped the Afar, who regard themselves as the oldest of Ethiopia’s ethnic groups having occupied their arid homeland for at least 2,000 years. Credit: James Jeffrey/IPS

Armed but amiable—fortunately: Here a young Afar man unsheathes the sword he carries attached to his waist. Historically, the Afar menfolk gained a reputation for ferocity and intolerance of outsiders, including the habit of cutting off the testicles of any foreigner found in their territory. The reality now is far removed from the stereotypes of travellers’ tales—the majority of Afar that the author met proved friendly, as well as patient about his photographic requests. Credit: James Jeffrey/IPS

Less on the move nowadays: A kite bird of prey rests on a rooftop in the town of Asaita overlooking the Awash River, beside which can be seen distinctive dome-shaped Afar homes. Traditionally the Afar are nomadic pastoralists, living in light, flimsy houses which they transport from one location to the next on camel back. Recent decades have seen a trend towards an increased dependence on agriculture in the fertile and well-watered areas around the likes of Asaita. Credit: James Jeffrey/IPS

Pastoralist past not forgotten: Here a woman weaves palm frond into the matting used to cover traditional Afar homes. Afar women are typically responsible for constructing a family’s nomadic home from the ground up when a family moves to another location. Despite a visitor encountering friendliness, you still sense a robust mentality among the Afar, shaped by that tough nomadic pastoralist past, and which still continues, evidenced by the camels continuing to plod across the desert, and the clusters of domed houses dotting the parched plains. Credit: James Jeffrey/IPS

What’s that shimmering in the heat haze?: In the plains surrounding Asaita an enormous sugar factory towers over surrounding Afar homes, evidence that there appears to no longer be any part of Ethiopia immune to the country’s ambitions to develop. In recent years the government has made a concerted effort to establish sugar factories to meet growing local demand, create jobs and boost economic growth. This has included locating factories in remote areas instead of being concentrated in one region. Credit: James Jeffrey/IPS

Even the Afar can be shy: Here a young Afar woman consents to be photographed, though only after covering part of her face. Afar women often have intricate frizzed and braided hairstyles, and wear bright coloured bead necklaces, heavy earrings and brass anklets. Many Afar women cover their heads in public. This helps ward off the relentless sun. At the same time, the vast majority of Afar are Muslim. Despite Afar’s ancient trade links with the Christian highlands to the west, Islam was widely practiced in the region as early as the 13th century. Credit: James Jeffrey/IPS

Renowned for distinctive hairstyles: It’s not just Afar women who embrace eye-catching hairstyles. Afar men often wear their hair in thick Afro style or equally distinctive long curls, and dress in a light cotton toga. While these two men aren’t armed, Afar men rarely venture far without a sword or dagger, and these days the traditional knife can be supplemented or replaced by an AK-47 slung casually over the shoulder. Such weapons are still frequently put to fatal use in disputes between local clans. Credit: James Jeffrey/IPS

Trading salt and more: The main thoroughfare through the city of Logiya sees a constant stream of trucks on the way to and from ports across the nearby border in Djibouti. At the same time more modern goods are being taken into Ethiopia to sustain the growing needs of its developing population, the Afar continue to load up camels with bars of salt, cut out of the desiccated ground, to transport to the region of Tigray along the ancient caravan routes. Until modern times, the Afar region effectively served as Ethiopia’s Mint, producing the amoles—salt bars—that served as the main currency in the highlands. Credit: James Jeffrey/IPS

Beguiling mix: At Asaita the Awash River cuts a green swathe through the desert, evoking images of Egyptian pastures watered by the Nile. As the sun begins to set over Asaita, the muezzin can be heard calling the faithful to prayer, while electric lights start appearing in the sugar factory in the distance. It’s a striking impression of old and new, tradition and modernisation co-existing together. “Things are simpler here,” Yohannes, a young man in Logiya, says about the local way of life. Credit: James Jeffrey/IPS

Still embracing the low-tech way of life:
Despite Ethiopia undergoing great changes as it rapidly develops, the nomadic lifestyle lives on in Afar away from its urban centres. Afar men can be seen driving their precious camel herds alongside roads, or as small specks in the distance stretching out across the sands before finally disappearing in the hot horizon. Traveling around Ethiopia and the likes of the Afar can leave a visitor pondering what countries in the Global South might teach more developed countries rushing headlong into a high-tech-focused future about better balancing tradition and modernisation. Credit: James Jeffrey/IPS

By Mandeep S.Tiwana
JOHANNESBURG, Jun 10 2015 (IPS)

Whistle-blowers like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange are hounded – not by autocratic but by democratic governments – for revealing the truth about grave human rights violations. Nobel peace prize winner, writer and political activist Liu Xiaobo  is currently languishing in a Chinese prison while the killing of Egyptian protestor, poet and mother Shaimaa al-Sabbagh, apparently by a masked policeman, in January this year continues to haunt us. 

CIVICUS, the global civil society alliance, has documented serious abuses of civic freedoms in 96 countries in 2014 alone. The annual report of the international advocacy group, Human Rights Watch, laments that the once-heralded Arab Spring has given way almost everywhere to conflict and repression while Amnesty International’s Annual Report 2014/2015 calls it a devastating year for those seeking to stand up for human rights.

Mandeep S. Tiwana

In recent years, there has been a perceptible rise in restrictions on civic space – the fundamental freedoms of expression, association and peaceful assembly. While the reasons for the eruption of repressive laws and attacks on dissenters vary, negative effects are being felt in both democracies and authoritarian states.

It is increasingly evident that the dangers to civic freedoms come not just from state apparatuses but also from powerful non-state actors including influential business entities and extremist groups subscribing to fundamentalist ideologies. This begs a deeper analysis into the extent and causes of this pervasive problem.

In several countries, laws continue to be drawn up to restrict civic freedoms. They include anti-terror laws that limit freedom of speech, public order laws that limit the right to protest peacefully, laws that stigmatise civil society groups through derogatory names such as ‘foreign agents’, laws that create bureaucratic hurdles to receive crucial funding from international philanthropic institutions as well as laws that prevent progressive civil society organisations from protecting the rights of marginalised minorities such as the LGBTI community.

In this situation, it is indeed possible to identify four key drivers of the pervasive assault on civic space. The first is the global democratic deficit.  Freedom House, which documents the state of democratic rights around the world, has reported declines in civil liberties and political freedoms for the ninth consecutive year in 2015.

In too many countries, peaceful activists exposing corruption and rights violations are being stigmatised as ‘national security threats’, and subjected to politically motivated trials, arbitrary detentions and worse. There appears to be no let up in official censorship and repression of active citizens in authoritarian states like China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Vietnam.“It is increasingly evident that the dangers to civic freedoms come not just from state apparatuses but also from powerful non-state actors including influential business entities and extremist groups subscribing to fundamentalist ideologies”

Freedom of assembly is virtually non-existent in such contexts, and activists are often forced to engage online. But when they do so, they are demonised as being agents of Western security agencies.

Ironically, excessive surveillance and/or hounding of whistle-blowers by countries such as Australia, France, the United Kingdom and United States – whose foreign policies are supposed to promote democratic rights – are contributing to a global climate where close monitoring of anyone suspected of harbouring dissenting views is becoming an accepted norm.

The second driver – and linked to the global democratic deficit – is the worldwide obsession with state security and countering of ‘terrorism’ by all actors except the state. The decline in civic space began after the attack on the World Trade Centre in September 2001 when several established democracies introduced a slew of counter-terror measures weakening human rights safeguards in the name of protecting national security.

The situation worsened after the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 as authoritarian leaders witnessed the fall of long-standing dictators in Egypt and Tunisia following widespread citizen protests. The possibility of people’s power being able to overturn entrenched political systems has made authoritarian regimes extremely fearful of the free exercise of civic freedoms by citizens.

This has led to a severe push back against civil society by a number of repressive regimes in the Middle East and North Africa. Governments in Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Oman, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have stepped up their efforts to prevent public demonstrations and the activities of human rights groups.

Similar reverberations have also been felt in sub-Saharan African countries with long-standing authoritarian leaders and totalitarian political parties. Thus repression of civic freedoms appears to have intensified in countries such as Angola, Burundi, Ethiopia, Gambia, Rwanda, Sudan, Swaziland and Zimbabwe.

Activists and civil society groups in many countries in Central Asia and Eastern Europe where democracy remains fragile or non-existent such as Azerbaijan, Belarus, Hungary, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Turkey, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan are also feeling the heat following governments’ reactions to scuttle demands for political reform.

In South-East Asia too, in countries such as Cambodia and Malaysia which have a history of repressive government and in Thailand where the military seized power through a recent coup, new ‘security’ measures continue to be implemented to restrict civic freedoms.

The third major driver of closing civic space is the rampant collusion and indeed capture of power and resources in most countries by a handful of interconnected political and economic elites.

Oxfam International projects that the richest one percent will own more wealth than 99 percent of the globe’s population by 2016.  Thus civil society groups exposing corruption and/or environmental degradation by politically well-connected businesses are extremely vulnerable to persecution due to the tight overlap and cosy relationships among elites.

With market fundamentalism and the neo-liberal economic discourse firmly entrenched in a number of democracies, labour, land and environmental rights activists are facing heightened challenges.

At least 29 environmental activists were reported murdered in Brazil in 2014. Canada’s centre-right government has been closely monitoring and intimidating indigenous peoples’ rights activists opposing large commercial projects in ecologically fragile areas. India’s prime minister recently urged judges to be wary of “five-star activists“ even as the efforts of Greenpeace India to protect forests from the activities of extractive industries have led it to be subjected to various forms of bureaucratic harassment including arbitrary freezing of its bank accounts.

The fourth and emerging threat to civic space comes from the disturbance caused by religious fundamentalist and evangelist groups seeking to upend the collective progress made by civil society in advancing the human rights discourse.

Failure of the international community to prevent violent conflict and address serious human rights abuses by states such as Israel and Syria is providing a fertile breeding ground for religious extremists whose ideology is deeply inimical to the existence of a vibrant and empowered civil society. 

Besides, religious fundamentalists are able to operate more freely in conflicted and politically fragile environments whose number appears to be rising, thereby exacerbating the situation for civil society organisations and activists seeking to promote equality, peace and tolerance.

Current threats to civic space and civil society activities are a symptom of the highly charged and polarised state of international affairs. The solutions to the grave and interconnected economic, ecological and humanitarian crises currently facing humanity will eventually have to come from civil society through a reassertion of its own value even as political leaders continue to undermine collective efforts.

Beginning a series of conversations on how to respond to common threats at the national, regional and international levels is critical. Establishment of solidarity protocols within civil society could be an effective way to coalesce around both individual cases of harassment as well as systemic threats such as limiting legislation or policies.

Further, the international legal framework that protects civic space needs to be strengthened. The International Bill of Rights comprising the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) leaves scope for subjective interpretation of some aspects of civic freedoms.

It is perhaps time to examine the possibility of a comprehensive legally binding convention on civic space that better articulates the extent and scope of civic space, so essential to an empowered civil society.  However, laws are only as good as the commitment of those charged with overseeing their implementation.

Importantly and urgently, to reverse the global onslaught on civic space and human rights, we need visionary political leadership willing to take risks and lead by example.

Over the last few years, analysts have noted with horror the steady dismantling of hard won gains on civic freedoms. Many thought things could get no worse. … but they did.

It is time to start thinking seriously about stemming the tide before we reach the point of no return. Ending the persecution of Assange, Snowden and Liu Xiaobo could be a good start for preventing precious lives such as Shaimaa’s from being lost.

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

This hunter is a member of the Waorani community, an Amazonian indigenous people who live in eastern Ecuador. Credit: Courtesy Nicolas Villaume, Land is Life

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, May 8 2015 (IPS)

In the course of human history many tens of thousands of communities have survived and thrived for hundreds, even thousands, of years. Scores of these largely self-sustaining traditional communities continue to this day in remote jungles, forests, mountains, deserts, and in the icy regions of the North. A few remain completely isolated from modern society.

According to United Nations estimates, upwards of 370 million indigenous people are spread out over 70 countries worldwide. Between them, they speak over 5,000 languages.

“Living well is all about keeping good relations with Mother Earth and not living by domination or extraction." -- Victoria Tauli Corpuz, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
But as the fingers of economic development reach into ever more distant corners of the globe, many of these communities find themselves – and their way of life – under threat.

The march of progress means that efforts are being made both to extract the resources on which these communities rely and to ‘mainstream’ indigenous groups by introducing Western medical, educational and economic systems into traditional ways of life.

“There are two uncontacted communities near my home but there is the threat of oil exploration. They don’t want this. For them, taking the oil out of the ground is like taking blood out of their bodies,” Moi Enomenga, a Waorani who was born into an uncontacted community, told IPS.

The Waorani are an Amazonian indigenous people who live in eastern Ecuador, in an area of oil drilling activity. No one knows how long they existed before the first encounter with Europeans in the late 1600s.

“Indigenous peoples will continue to work in our communities to strengthen our cultures and resist exploitation of our territories,” Enomenga stressed.

Although Ecuador has ratified the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which grants communities the right to consultation on extractive projects that impact their customary land, organisations say that mining and oil drilling projects have cast doubt on the government’s commitment to uphold these rights, and spurred protests by indigenous peoples.

Ecovillages: a step towards an indigenous lifestyle

Despite their long history all indigenous and local communities are under intense pressure to be part a globalised economic system that offers some benefits but too often destroys their land and culture.

The village of Ustupu in the semi-autonomous Kuna Territory located in the San Blas Archipelago of eastern Panama, points to a simple, sustainable way of life. Credit: Nicolas Villaume, Land is Life

Worse, it’s a system that is unsustainable, and has produced global threats including climate change, and biodiversity crises.

In the past four decades alone, the numbers of animals, birds, reptiles and fish on the Earth has declined 52 percent; 95 percent of coral reefs are in danger of dying out due to pollution, coastal development and overfishing; and only 15 percent of the world’s forests remain intact.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions due to human activity have increased the global average temperature 0.85 degrees Celsius and will go much higher, threatening human civilization unless emissions are sharply reduced.

Modern western culture has only been in existence some 200 years and it’s clearly unsustainable, according to Lee Davies, a board member of the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN).

For 20 years GEN has helped thousands of villages, urban neighbourhoods and intentional communities live better and lighter on the Earth.

“Traditional indigenous communities offer the best example of sustainability we have,” Davies said in an interview with IPS.

GEN communities have high quality, low impact ways of living with some of the lowest per capita carbon footprints in the industrialised world.

Findhorn Ecovillage in the United Kingdom is one of the best known and has half the ecological footprint of the UK national average.

It includes 100 ecologically-benign buildings, supplies energy from four wind turbines, and features solar water heating, a biological Living Machine waste water treatment system and a car-sharing club that includes electric vehicles and more.

Carbon neutral eco-houses at the Findhorn Ecovillage in Scotland provide an example of communities modeling their lifestyle on indigenous peoples. Credit: Courtesy Findhorn Foundation

Ecovillages aren’t about technology. They are locally owned, socially conscious communities using participatory ways to enhance the spiritual, social, ecological and economic aspects of life.

Senegal has 45 ecovillages and recently launched an ambitious effort to turn more than 14,000 villages into ecovillages with full community participation.

Among its members, GEN counts the Sri Lankan organisation Sarvodaya, a rural network that includes 2,000 active sustainable villages in the island nation of 20 million people.

“This is all about finding ways for humanity to survive. Much of this is a return to the values and practices of indigenous peoples,” Davies said.

Simple communities, not big development projects

Life is hard for mountain-dwelling communities, especially as the impacts of climate change become more and more apparent, according to Matthew Tauli, a member of the indigenous Kankana-ey Igorot community in the mountainous region of the Philippines.

“We need small, simple things, not big economic development projects like big dams or mining projects,” Tauli told IPS.

The Philippines is home to an estimated 14-17 million indigenous people belonging to 110 ethno-linguistic groups, accounting for nearly 17 percent of the population of 98 million people. A huge number of these peoples face threats to their traditional ways of life, particularly as a result of forcible displacement from, or destruction of, their ancestral lands, according to the United Nations.

As everywhere in the world, communities from the Northern Luzon, the most populous island in the Philippines, to Mindanao, a large island in the south, are fighting hard to resist destructive forms of development.

Their struggles find echo in other parts of the region, particular in countries like India, home to 107 million tribal people, referred to locally as Adivasis.

“We resisted the government’s efforts to make us grow plantations and plant the same crops over wide areas,” K. Pandu Dora, an Adivasi from the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, told IPS.

Andhra Pradesh is home to over 49 million people. According to the 2011 census, scheduled tribes constituted 5.3 percent of the total population, amounting to just under three million people.

Dora’s people live on hilltops in forests where they practice shifting cultivation, working intimately with the cycles of nature.

Neighbouring tribes that followed government experts’ advice to adopt modern agricultural methods with chemical fertilisers and monocultures are suffering terribly, Dora said through a translator.

With over 70 percent of the state’s tribal and farming communities living below the poverty line, unsustainable agricultural practices represent a potential disaster for millions of people.

Already, climate change is wreaking havoc on planting and harvesting practices, disrupting the natural cycles that rural communities are accustomed to.

Unlike the farmers stuck in government-sponsored programmes, however, Dora’s people have responded by increasing the diversity of their crops, and remain confident in their capacity to innovate.

“We will find our own answers,” he said.

In drought-stricken Kenya, small farmers who relied on a diverse selection of crops continue to do well according to Patrick Mangu, an ethnobotanist at the Nairobi National Museum of Kenya.

“Mrs. Kimonyi is never hungry,” Mangu told IPS as he described a local farmer’s one-hectare plot of land, which has 57 varieties planted in a mix of cereals, legumes, roots, tubers, fruit and herbs.

It is this diversity, mainly from local varieties that produced edible products virtually every day of the year, that have buffered Kimonyi from the impacts of drought, he said.

Nearly half of Kenya’s 44 million people live below the poverty line, the vast majority of them in rural areas of the central and western regions of the country.

Embracing traditional farming methods could play a huge role in improving incomes, health and food security across the country’s vast agricultural belt, but the government has yet to make a move in this direction.

Protecting the people who protect the Earth

Traditional knowledge and a holistic culture is a key part of the longevity of many indigenous peoples. The Quechua communities in the Cuzco region of southern Peru, for instance, have used their customary laws to manage more than 2,000 varieties of potatoes.

“To have potatoes, there must be land, people to work it, a culture to support the people, Mother Earth and the mountain gods,” Alejandro Argumedo, a program director at the Quechua-Aymara Association for Nature and Sustainable Development (ANDES), told IPS.

The communities developed their own agreement for sharing the benefits derived from these crops, based on traditional principles. Potatoes are more than food; they are a cultural symbol and important to all aspects of life for the Quechua, said Argumedo.

But preserving this way of life is no easy undertaking in Peru, where 632 native communities lack the titles to their land.

For Mexican Zapotec indigenous communities located in the Sierra Norte Mountains of central Mexico, there is no private property.

Rather than operating their community-owned forest industry to maximise profits, the Zapotec communities focus on job creation, reducing emigration to cities and enhancing the overall wellbeing of the community.

Protecting and managing their forestlands for many generations into the future is considered part of the community obligation.

Local people run virtually everything in the community as part of their ‘duties’ as community members. This includes being part of administration, neighbourhood, school and church committees, performing all vital roles from community policeman to municipal president.

What makes this all work is communal trust, deeply shared values that arise from long experience and knowledge, said David Barton Bray, a professor at Florida International University in Miami.

“These kinds of communities will be more important in the years to come because they can address vital issues that the state and the market cannot,” Bray told IPS back in 2010.

Around the world the best-protected forests are under the care of indigenous peoples, said Estebancio Castro Diaz of the Kuna Nation in southeastern Panama. More than 90 percent of the forests controlled by the Kuna people, for instance, are still standing.

This does not hold true for the rest of Panama, which lost over 14 percent of its forest cover in just two decades, between 1990 and 2010.

“The forest is a supermarket for us, it is not just about timber. There are also broad benefits to the larger society for local control of forests,” Diaz said.

Since trees absorb climate-heating carbon dioxide, healthy forests represent an important tool in fighting climate change. Forests under control of local peoples absorb 37 billion tonnes of CO2 a year, Victoria Tauli Corpuz, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, told IPS.

“In Guatemala forests managed by local people have 20 times less deforestation than those managed by the state, in Brazil it is 11 times lower,” said Tauli Corpuz.

However many governments neither recognise indigenous land tenure rights nor their traditional ways of managing forests, she added.

Moi Enomenga, a Waorani leader from Ecuador, was born into an uncontacted community. Credit: Courtesy Brian Keane, Land is Life

The overarching issue when it comes to dealing with climate change, biodiversity loss and living sustainably requires changing the current economic system that was created to dominate and extract resources from nature, she asserted.

“Modern education and knowledge is mainly about how to better dominate nature. It is never about how to live harmoniously with nature.

“Living well is all about keeping good relations with Mother Earth and not living by domination or extraction,” she concluded.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Food security and a balanced diet for all must be combined with the knowledge of indigenous peoples’ food systems and livelihoods as a contribution to sustainable development. Credit: IFAD

By Valentina Gasbarri
ROME, Feb 23 2015 (IPS)

Overcoming hunger and malnutrition in the 21st century no longer means simply increasing the quantity of available food but also the quality.

Despite numerous achievements in the world’s food systems, approximately 805 million people suffer from chronic hunger and roughly two billion peoples suffer from one or more micronutrient deficiencies while, at the same time, over 2.8 billion people are obese.

Unfortunately, the debate over how to address this challenge has polarised, pitting agriculture and global commerce against local food systems and traditional ecological knowledge, land-based ways of life and a holistic, interdependent relationship between people and the Earth.“Arrogantly and insolently, humanity has cultivated the idea of development and progress based on the belief that the planet’s resources are infinite and that human domination of nature is limitless” – Carlo Petrini, founder of the International Slow Food Movement

Organised to reflect on this, among other issues, the second Global Meeting of the Indigenous Peoples’ Forum, held at the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) from Feb. 12-13 in Rome, discussed solutions that combine the need to ensure food security and a balanced diet for all with the knowledge of indigenous peoples’ food systems and livelihoods as a contribution to sustainable development.

According to IFAD President Kanayo F. Nwanze, “indigenous peoples’ lands are some of the most biologically and ecologically diverse places on earth … It is only now, in the 21st century, that the rest of the world is starting to value the biodiversity that is a core value of indigenous societies.” Occupying nearly 20 percent of the Earth’s land area, indigenous groups act as custodians of biodiversity.

Participants at the Forum debated the potential of indigenous livelihood systems and practices – thanks to an age-old tradition of inter-generational knowledge transmission – to contribute to and inspire new transformative approaches of sustainable development, synthesising culture and identity, firmly anchored in respect for individual and collective rights.

However, the Forum described how many indigenous communities and ecosystems are at risk due to the lack of recognition of their rights and fair treatment by governments and corporations, population growth, climate change, migration and conflict. According to participants, the on-going exclusion of indigenous people devalues not only the importance of their communities but also the traditional ecological and agricultural knowledge they possess.

“Arrogantly and insolently, humanity has cultivated the idea of development and progress based on the belief that the planet’s resources are infinite and that human domination of nature is limitless,” Carlo Petrini, founder of the International Slow Food Movement, said at a Forum side event focused on the interconnections among nutrition, food security and sustainable development.

“The march towards this idea of progress has left women, youth and elderly people and indigenous populations at the end of the line with no one left to give a voice to them,” he continued. “All the drama of modern reality is now revealing itself: the ‘glorious march’ of progress is now on the edge of a precipice, the present crisis the fruit of greed and ignorance.”

Largely addressing the so-called developed world, the Forum described how many of the good practices and traditional empirical wisdom of indigenous peoples deserve to be studied with care and attention. For example, boosting local economies and agriculture, along with respect for small communities, are ways of reconciling man with the earth and nature.

At the same time, many indigenous communities have certain foods – including corn, taro and wild rice – that are considered sacred and are cultivated through sustainable land and water practices.  This contrasts with the global production, distribution and consumption of food which pays little attention to loss of water and soil fertility, genetic plant and animal erosion and unprecedented food waste.

The Forum also heard how issues related to the paramount role of indigenous peoples’ food systems are central to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) projects managed by the Center for Indigenous Peoples’ Nutrition and Environment (CINE) at Montreal’s McGill University in Canada.

“Years of work have documented the traditional food systems of indigenous peoples and their dietary habits to understand matriarchy and the role of women in food security and community peace in Canada,” said Harriet V. Kuhnlein, Professor Emerita of Human Nutrition and founding Director of CINE.

Kuhnlein described one of CINE’s projects, the Kahnawake Schools Diabetes Prevention Project, a three-year community-based project focused on a primary prevention programme for non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus in a Mohawk community near Montreal.

Among others, the project organised community-based activities promoting healthy lifestyles and demonstrated that “a native community-based diabetes prevention programme is feasible through participatory research that incorporates native culture and local expertise,” said Kuhnlein.

According to Forum participants, the reintroduction of local food products is essential for feeding the planet – “here we see real democracy in action,” said one speaker – and a major effort is needed to avoid practices that exacerbate the negative impacts of food production and consumption on climate, water and ecosystems.

There was also a call for the post-Millennium Development Goal (MDG) agenda to ensure a healthy environment as an internationally guaranteed human right, with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which will replace the MDGS at the end of 2015, encouraging governments to work towards agricultural policies that are compatible with environmental sustainability and trade rules that are consistent with food security.

It was agreed that none of this will be easy to implement and will require both a strong accountability framework and the will to enforce it, including through recognition of corporate responsibility in the private sector.

As the world prepares for the post-2015 scenario, the Indigenous Peoples’ Forum in Rome said that it was crucial to incorporate food security, environmental issues, poverty reduction and indigenous peoples’ rights into discussions around the new goals of sustainable development involving citizens, governments, academic institutions, private corporations and international organisations worldwide.

Edited by Phil Harris

IFAD President Kanayo F. Nwanzwe (centre) joins in a traditional Fijian dance at the opening ceremony of the second Global Meeting of the Indigenous Peoples' Forum, February 2015. Credit: IFAD

By Valentina Gasbarri
ROME, Feb 17 2015 (IPS)

“We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children” – an ancient Indian saying that encapsulates the essence of sustainability as seen by the world’s indigenous people.

With their deep and locally-rooted knowledge of the natural world, indigenous peoples have much to share with the rest of the world about how to live, work and cultivate in a sustainable manner that does not jeopardise future generations.

This was the main message brought to the second Global Meeting of the Indigenous Peoples’ Forum, organised by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) last week in Rome.“We have learned the relevance of the diversity and distinctiveness of peoples and rural communities and of valuing and building on their cultural identity as an asset and economic potential. The ancient voice of the natives can be the solution to many crises” – Antonella Cordone, IFAD

The Indigenous Peoples’ Forum represents a unique initiative within the U.N. system. It is a concrete expression of IFAD’s recognition of the role that indigenous peoples play in economic and social development through traditional sustainable practices and provides IFAD with an institutional mechanism for monitoring and evaluating the effectiveness of the agency’s engagement with indigenous peoples.

This engagement includes achievement of the objectives of the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of the Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).

Despite major improvements in recent decades, indigenous and tribal peoples – as well as ethnic minorities – continue to be among the poorest and most marginalised people in the world.

There are over 370 million indigenous peoples in some 70 countries worldwide, with the majority living in Asia. They account for an estimated five percent of the world’s population, with 15 percent of these peoples living in poverty.  Various recent studies show that the poverty gap between indigenous peoples and other rural populations is increasing in some parts of the world.

“IFAD is making all efforts to ensure that the indigenous peoples’ voice is being heard, rights are respected and well-being is improving at the global level,” said Antonella Cordone, IFAD’s Senior Technical Specialist for Indigenous peoples and Tribal Issues.

“We have learned the relevance of the diversity and distinctiveness of peoples and rural communities and of valuing and building on their cultural identity as an asset and economic potential,” she continued. “The ancient voice of the natives can be the solution to many crises.”

As guardians of the world’s natural resources and vehicles of traditions over the years, indigenous peoples developed a holistic approach to sustainable development and, as the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, highlighted during an Asia-Pacific working group session, “indigenous peoples’ livelihoods are closely interlinked with cultural heritage and identities, spirituality and governance systems.”

These livelihoods have traditionally been based on handing down lands and territories to new generations without exploiting them for maximum profit. Today, these livelihoods are threatened by climate change and third party exploitation, among others.

Climate change, to which indigenous peoples are particularly vulnerable, is posing a dramatic threat through melting glaciers, advancing desertification, floods and hurricanes in coastal areas.

Long-standing pressure from logging, mining and advancing agricultural frontiers have intensified the exploitation of new energy sources, construction of roads and other infrastructures, such as dams, and have raised concerns about large-scale acquisition of land for commercial or industrial purposes, commonly known as land grabbing.

In this context, the Forum stressed the need for the free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) of indigenous peoples whenever development projects affect their access to land and resources, a requirement which IFAD President Kanayo F. Nwanzwe said should be respected by any organisation engaging with indigenous peoples.

Poverty and loss of territories and resources by indigenous peoples due to policies or regulations adverse to traditional land use practices are compounded by frequent discrimination in labour markets, where segmentation, poor regulatory frameworks and cultural and linguistic obstacles allow very few indigenous peoples to access quality jobs and social and health services.

Moreover, indigenous peoples suffer from marginalisation from political processes and gender-based discrimination.

These are among the issues that participants at the Forum said should be taken into account in the post-2015 development agenda. They said that this agenda should be designed to encourage governments and other actors to facilitate the economic and social empowerment of poor rural people, in particular, marginalized rural groups, such as women, children and indigenous peoples.

A starting point for the architecture of the agenda for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which will replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that expire at the end of this year was seen as the recommendations adopted during the two-day Forum (Feb. 12-13).

These included the need for a holistic approach to supporting and strengthening indigenous peoples’ food systems, recognition of traditional tenure, conservation of biodiversity,  respect for and revitalisation of cultural and spiritual values, and ensuring that projects be designed with the FPIC of indigenous peoples.

Participants said that it is important to emphasise the increasing need to strengthen the participation and inclusion of indigenous peoples in discussions at the political and operational level, because targets in at these levels can have a catalytic effect on their social and economic empowerment.

The Forum agreed that giving the voice to indigenous people and their concerns and priorities in the post-2015 agenda represents an invaluable window of opportunity for development.

Edited by Phil Harris    

The Bonda tribe is one of the most ancient indigenous groups in India. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

By Gloria Schiavi
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 4 2014 (IPS)

The world’s 370 million indigenous people, who say they were marginalised in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), want to play a key role in the U.N.’s post-2015 development agenda, which will be finalised next year.

“The world can still benefit from [our] knowledge by including us in the journey for the next 15 years. And we want this to be an equal partnership, we do not want to be beneficiaries,” stated Galina Angarova, the New York representative of Tebtebba Foundation (the Indigenous Peoples’ International Center for Policy Research and Education).

In her speech at the closing session of the three-day conference of NGOs sponsored by the U.N. Department of Public Information (DPI) last week, she highlighted the need to include marginalised groups in development targets as well as in the on-going negotiations for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which will replace the MDGs in 2015.

"A lot of the corporations are eyeing [indigenous peoples'] territories for future profit. This is why free prior and informed consent is key. Because without it, they are just free to go and grab, and develop on those territories." -- Galina Angarova, the New York representative of Tebtebba Foundation (Indigenous Peoples' International Center for Policy Research and Education)
Indigenous peoples continue to fight for their right to self-determination, which is not a reality yet, despite being granted by the 2007 U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

The outcome document of the DPI/NGO conference, drafted and amended through a participative process over the past months, will feed into the discussion about the post-2015 agenda and the SDGs in the General Assembly, the first World Conference on Indigenous People that will be held on Sep. 22-23, and into the Secretary General’s synthesis report to be issued later this autumn.

Although this declaration is not legally binding, it has strong power in terms of accountability and review mechanisms, which are key points in the SDGs.

“The fact that the resource document is based upon officially submitted positions by major U.N. groups and stakeholders gives it quite a strong voice,” Maruxa Cardama, co-chair of the conference declaration drafting committee, told IPS.

“I think that this document can take us very far if we understand the power of soft law and soft policy,” she added.

This year marked the 65th edition of the DPI/NGO conference, which returned to New York after seven years, and registered an unprecedented attendance from civil society: more than 2,000 representatives of international NGOs gathered from more than 100 countries. Among those present, indigenous groups and organisations managed to make a strong case for their inclusion in the development agenda.

According to Angarova, indigenous peoples’ territories cover 24 percent of the land worldwide, and host 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity.

“A lot of the corporations are eyeing those territories for future profit. This is why free prior and informed consent is key. Because without it they [corporations] are just free to go and grab, and develop on those territories,” she told IPS.

Indigenous people are then thrown into mainstream society without the means to survive.

Instead, advocates and representatives say they should be able to give their consent to any reforms that directly or indirectly impact governance in their community, or development in the lands they inhabit.

“This has to be done at all levels, starting from the sustainable development programmes; and then the national governments should derive the mandate from the U.N. level, from the multilateral level down to national government plans,” Angarova stated.

Harnessing these policies into the development goals of reducing hunger and achieving food security also has great potential.

Not only must these communities be able to access the natural resources but they also have to ensure the learning curriculum for their children includes traditional education and allows kids to spend time with elders to learn about the cycle of life, nature, harvesting and farming.

Their challenge is now to preserve their knowledge and pass it on.

“The knowledge and understanding that we have is really vital […],” Carmen continued. “Maybe the world will look at indigenous people and ask in a respectful way how to grow corn with no water.”

Myrna Cunningham, president of the Centre for Autonomy and Development of Indigenous People in Nicaragua, pointed out that indigenous people are not poor of their own accord, but have been impoverished as a result of the development paradigm that has been imposed on them.

For instance, about 600 indigenous languages have been lost in the past 100 years, roughly one every two weeks. As language is part of the biodiversity indigenous communities preserve, losing language means losing biodiversity. This is necessarily linked to a change in their relationship with the world.

Carmen explained to IPS that there is no translation in indigenous language for words like “intellectual property” or “human rights”, for example. These concepts have to be imported from a different culture.

So things have been literally lost in translation. Paradigms from other languages and cultures have been imposed over a reality that was perceived in a different way for centuries.

Now it is time to revisit this paradigm, as the world prepares for a decade of inclusive and sustainable development.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Donato Ayma in the Atipiri radio station booth. Credit: Franz Chávez /IPS

By Franz Chávez
EL ALTO, Bolivia, Dec 7 2012 (IPS)

Every morning from 6:00 to 8:00 AM, native people in this sprawling working-class suburb of La Paz, Bolivia listen to the programme broadcast by former education minister Donato Ayma in the Aymara language.

He starts his programme every day on the local Atipiri radio station saying “Mä amuyuki, mä ch’amaki” (“with one single thought, one single force,” in Aymara).

In an interview with IPS, Ayma explains the importance of the radio to Bolivia’s predominantly indigenous rural highlands population.

Ayma, one of Bolivia’s best-known native broadcasters, says “the radio is still the most accessible and easily operated media” in this geographically diverse country of high mountains peaks, altiplano, valleys, lowlands and Amazon jungle.

He describes campesinos ploughing their steep fields in the bleak Andes highlands, where the ploughs are still pulled by oxen, accompanied by the songs on their portable radios.

“The young women prefer to hear programmes in their mother tongue – they’re bilingual, but they tend to choose music that reflects the thinking and experiences of their people,” he says, describing life in the highlands.

Electricity is often unavailable and newspapers rarely reach remote villages, where the radio is listened to “by illiterate people; people can listen to each other, using their ears.”

The Aymara academic and researcher describes his childhood in the frigid altiplano, in Toledo, a village in the western department or province of Oruro. That is where he began his career behind a microphone, in 1969, and began to develop what he calls a New Model of Communication (NUMOCOM) for Bolivia.

“I’m a radio aficionado,” he says enthusiastically, discussing his seven-month stint in the cabinet of President Carlos Mesa (2003-2005), his 15 years at the San Gabriel Radio station, and his experience now in Atapiri, a station launched to discover radio broadcasting talent among indigenous people.

Since 2006, Atipiri has been putting into practice the ideas of the Centre of Education and Communication for Indigenous Communities and Peoples, of which Ayma is a founder. Like the San Gabriel station, it broadcasts from El Alto, a city of one million in the highlands next to La Paz.

El Alto is home to many of the indigenous Bolivians who have come to La Paz, the seat of government, from rural villages.

Initiatives to keep native culture and values alive and to help indigenous people in rural areas integrate have, paradoxically, mushroomed in El Alto.

Ayma pointed out that in the 2001 census, 62 percent of the population of Bolivia identified themselves as indigenous.

That census not only asked people for the first time whether they saw themselves as belonging to an indigenous group, but it also found that the mother tongue of half of the population was an indigenous language.

Based on these and other figures, the National Statistics Institute estimates that 66 percent of the population has an indigenous “ethnolinguistic” origin.

The 2009 constitution declared Bolivia a “plurinational” state, with 36 different ethnolinguistic groups.

Ayma bases his new model of communication, NUMOCOM, on the concept of “community radio stations as instruments of communication and development” which offer programming that comes from “the deep roots of the people.”

The first commercial radio station in this country was Radio Nacional de Bolivia, which began to operate in March 1929. But broadcasting in the Aymara language – the most widely spoken indigenous tongue in Bolivia, after Quechua – only dates back to the 1960s, when a programme in that language was on the air from 5:00 to 7:00 AM.

Under the NUMOCOM model, experienced, university-educated journalists become communicators speaking in their mother tongues and producing programming tailored to their communities.

The reality these communicators address and reflect in the community radio stations is ignored by the mainstream press and broadcast media, Ayma said.

“The pages of any Latin American newspaper are full of news about the European royalty, their weddings, their pregnancies,” he says. “But we don’t see news from
Charaña (on the western border with Chile), the foothills of Anallajchi (a snow-capped mountain), the llama grazing areas, or the Amazon jungle.

“At this very moment, a herder is coming home thirsty after a long day of work, and he’s listening to us,” says Ayma, who adds that the herder complains that his life isn’t reflected in the media, which are dominated by the homogeneous popular entertainment programming of the transnational media corporations.

Ayma criticises the commercial radio stations of El Alto because they ignore traditional Bolivian Andean music, played with pan pipes, charango, guitar and drums, and only play cumbia combined with techno and rap.

He cited Bolivian journalist Luis Ramiro Beltrán, 1983 winner of the McLuhan Teleglobe Canada award for his theories on communication for development, which were predominant in Bolivia in the 1960s and 1970s.

Taking these theories as a basis, Ayma developed his NUMOCOM model of communication, incorporating other values like environmental conservation, preservation of Pachamama or Mother Earth, and the appropriate use of water for human consumption and irrigation.

He also urges people to fight the use of synthetic products that end up in garbage dumps or the water, and kill livestock.

Finally, he advocates horizontal communication, to be used in the organising and empowerment of communities, in which the communicators are part of the action.

He says, for example, that while vertical communication gives orders, like “sweep the streets,” horizontal communication gets the broadcaster involved, who joins in the task and says “let’s sweep the streets.”

Oil-polluted water in the Amazon region of Loreto. Credit: Courtesy of the office of Congresswoman Verónika Mendoza

By Milagros Salazar
IQUITOS/LIMA, Sep 5 2012 (IPS)

Peru will debut a new mechanism for prior consultation with indigenous peoples by seeking their approval for a new stage of oil drilling operations in the infamous Lot 1AB in the northeastern Amazon region of Loreto.

Local indigenous leaders are still skeptical about the announcement, given that the region has suffered from the ongoing impacts of oil industry activities for decades.

From the open mouth of a jaguar painted on a wall emerges the declaration: “You cannot buy my rivers or my happiness.” In the background are the forest, the sun, the river, children, women and men.

The image, which covers the façade of the office of the Regional Organisation of Indigenous Peoples of the East (ORPIO) in the city of Iquitos, succinctly sums up the environmental defense headed up by native leaders in recent years.

Iquitos is the capital of Loreto, where oil drilling operations date back 40 years. Indigenous leaders from four river basins in the region, all members of ORPIO, told Tierramérica about the impacts of these operations on their communities and the environment.

“The government has ignored us and has not obliged the companies to comply with their commitments. If a parent abandons its child, who has to pay for these damages? The parent, the government. And in second place, the company,” said David Chino, vice president of the Quechua Indigenous Federation of Pastaza.

Chino was in Lima during the last week of August along with another three “apus” (leaders) to meet with authorities from the legislative and executive branches of government, representing communities in the basins of the Pastaza, Corrientes, Tigre and Marañón Rivers.

On Aug. 27, the indigenous leaders succeeded in getting a multi-sectoral commission, headed by the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, to agree to hold a consultation with local communities before signing a contract with the new operators of Lot 1AB, which is currently held by the foreign oil company Pluspetrol Norte.

This consultation will be the first implemented in compliance with the International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) Convention 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries, which gave rise to the adoption of a law and regulations for its application in cases of projects in ancestral indigenous territories.

In addition, on Sep. 5-7, government technicians will visit the Pastaza area to assess the extent of the damages, the native leaders told Tierramérica*.

In Loreto, oil contamination is concentrated around Lots 1AB and 8. According to a report issued in July by a congressional working group that toured the region, in some areas of the four river basins the degree of toxicity is so high “that the use of bioremediation to break down the oil would be useless.”

That same month, indigenous community members working as environmental monitors reported 25 unremediated environmental liabilities in Lot 1AB – 17 on the Tigre River, two on the Corrientes and six in the Pastaza River basin.

In Lot 8, nine liabilities were identified in the Corrientes River basin.

In August, state-owned oil company Petroperú announced that the government would organise an advance tender for three lots, including 1AB. This raised the alarm among indigenous communities, and their leaders, during their visit to Lima, urged the authorities to not let any new operators in until the existing pollution has been cleaned up.

“How can I let you back into my house if you have done me harm? You have to fix the damage for me to believe in you,” commented Chino.

The Presidency of the Council of Ministers stated in a communiqué on Aug. 28 that a consultation will be held with local communities before a contract is signed for exploitation of Lot 1AB, and Environment Minister Manuel Pulgar confirmed the announcement the following day.

Details on how the consultation will be carried out are still unknown.

“Which communities will be consulted? What are the terms and conditions? Indigenous peoples need answers to these questions, because there is a great deal of mistrust,” Verónika Mendoza, a ruling party member of congress who participated as an observer in the working group that drafted the report, told Tierramérica.

“We think it is good that they will hold a consultation. But how can they remedy all of the damage they have done to us in the last 40 years in just a short time? They need to explain that to us first,” said Achuar indigenous leader Andrés Santi, president of the Federation of Native Communities of Corrientes.

Peru does not have an up-to-date inventory of environmental liabilities. However, it has been determined that there are over 6,000 resulting from oil and gas industry operations between 1863 and 1993. Close to 300 of these pose significant danger and are located in the Amazon region, particularly in Loreto, according to engineer Jorge Villar of Peru’s energy and mines regulator, OSINERGMIN.

Moreover, between 2007 and 2011, indigenous environmental monitors recorded 112 new oil spills, of which 82 were found in the area of Lot 1AB and the remainder in Lot 8.

The main cause of the spills is the corrosion of the pipelines used to transport the oil, according to the congressional working group’s report. But representatives of Pluspetrol Norte claim that a number of them were caused by acts of vandalism which are currently under legal investigation.

The congressional report found that the executive branch does not sufficiently monitor these risks, and recommended better control and epidemiological studies to determine the extent of the health impacts faced by the local population.

“The gills of the fish are black, full of oil. We eat at least a kilo of fish a day. When it rains, the polluted rivers overflow and flood everything, the soils, the forest,” Alfonso López, president of the San Pablo de Tipishca Cocama Association for Development and Conservation, told Tierramérica.

The working group’s report also stressed that the maximum limit of total petroleum hydrocarbons (TPH) established for soil remediation in Lot 1AB is 30 times higher than in Lot 8, although the situation in both is similar.

“We will follow up on the recommendations to deal with this serious problem. For a great many years, no one has paid attention to these peoples,” opposition Congresswoman Marisol Pérez Tello, who also participated in the drafting of the report, told Tierramérica.

Photos and videos of the contamination observed by the lawmakers have been passed on to the environmental prosecutor’s office.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

Survivors of the 1993 Haximú massacre hold urns containing the ashes of their relatives. Credit: Courtesy of C. Zacquini/Survival International

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Sep 3 2012 (IPS)

Up to 80 Yanomami men, women and children in a remote community in the Amazon jungle in southern Venezuela were reportedly killed in early July by wildcat gold miners from Brazil, according to indigenous organisations.

“Although there are questions about the number of victims, the activity of the garimpeiros (illegal gold miners who cross the border from Brazil) in that area and their sometimes difficult relations with the Yanomami communities have been known about for years,” José Ángel Divassón, a Catholic bishop in Amazonas state, told IPS from the regional capital, Puerto Ayacucho.

That state, at the bottom tip of Venezuela, is an area of 175,750 square kilometres that is home to 15 different indigenous groups. A large part of the state is covered with virgin jungle bathed by the waters of the tributaries of the Orinoco and Amazon rivers.

An environmental protection law banned mining in the entire mineral-rich state in 1989.

But “the garimpeiros, pressured by the authorities in northern Brazil, cross into Venezuela and establish relations with the Yanomami, to get their support in exchange for some goods. But sometimes that cooperation breaks down,” said Divassón, of the Salesian order, which carries out missionary work throughout the state of Amazonas.

On Aug. 27, the Horonami Yanomami Organisation filed a request in the public prosecutor’s office in Puerto Ayacucho for an investigation of the massacre reported by three survivors from Irotatheri, the village where the killings apparently took place in early July.

The Horonami Organisation’s request was backed by four other communities in the area of the headwaters of the Ocamo river – a tributary of the Orinoco – and the Parima Sierra, which marks part of the border with Brazil.

The survivors “had gone out to hunt and heard the noise of a helicopter in which the garimpeiros arrived, and the sound of explosions and gunshot in the ‘shabono’ (round, straw-roofed communal hut), which they found burnt down. Eighty people lived there,” Horonami leader Luis Shatiwë told the prosecutors.

Members of the Hokomawe community, who later visited Irotatheri, also saw the burnt remains of the shabono, as well as charred human bodies and bones. The group informed Shatiwë, who reported it to members of army Brigade 52, which operates in the area, on Jul. 27, according to the Horonami Organisation.

Marcos de Oliveira at Brazil’s Socioenvironmental Institute told the Caracas daily El Nacional that an injured survivor from Irotatheri reached a shabono on the Brazilian side of the border, where he was given medical assistance and was taken in by relatives in another community.

Survival International, a global organisation that helps tribal peoples defend their lives and their rights and protect their lands, said in a statement updated on Sept. 3 that “Due to the community’s remote location, it took the Indians who discovered the bodies days to walk to the nearest settlement to report the tragedy.”

Thirteen native organisations from the region, representing different indigenous communities, expressed solidarity with the Horonami Organisation’s denunciation. They said in a statement that the Yanomami communities in the area of the headwaters of the Ocamo river “have been invaded and attacked by illegal miners from Brazil for more than four years.”

“Since 2009, we have been informing state bodies in Venezuela of the presence of garimpeiros in the Alto Ocamo, attacks on the Momoi and Hokomawe communities, physical violence, threats, the exploitation of women, and the contamination of water with mercury, which has left a number of Yanomami dead,” the document says.

But state bodies, according to the organisations, “have not taken effective measures to expel the garimpeiros and design a plan for surveillance and control over their regular incursions in the area.”

The indigenous groups demanded “the adoption of bilateral measures with Brazil” to address the threat “to life, integrity and health” of the Yanomami. They also noted that July’s killings occurred “nearly 20 years after the massacre of Haximú.”

In June and July 1993, garimpeiros killed 16 Yanomami in the border community of Haximú. Five of the 24 individuals implicated were convicted and sentenced to prison in Brazil. And after a 15-year legal process, the Venezuelan state agreed to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights’ demand that it adopt measures of surveillance, control, protection and guarantees of healthcare provision in the Yanomami territories.

“It is infuriating that this happened in the midst of the revolutionary period of the construction of socialism (by the left-wing government of Hugo Chávez), after the rights of indigenous people were enshrined in the constitution for the first time in history,” Lusbi Portillo, the head of an environmental group that works with indigenous people, told IPS.

Survival International Director Stephen Corry said, “All Amazonian governments must stop the rampant illegal mining, logging and settlement in indigenous territories. It inevitably leads to massacres of Indian men, women and children. The Venezuelan authorities must now bring the killers to swift justice, and send a signal throughout the region that Indians can no longer be killed with impunity. The mining and logging must be stopped.”

The minister for indigenous peoples, Nicia Maldonado, a member of the Ye’kuana tribe from the Amazon rainforest, told state television on Saturday that a team of military officers, prosecutors and other officials flew by helicopter to the remote jungle area where the massacre was reported, and “found no evidence of any killings.”

Minister of the interior and justice Tarek El Aissami said seven of the nine Yanomami communities in that area had been contacted, and that no signs of violence were found.

The minister of defence, General Henry Rangel, said “the alleged massacre has not been confirmed, and this may have been the result of a confusion, after a first report of violence a few weeks ago, which was shown to be false.”

In its statement, Survival International said ”We do not believe the (government) investigating team has even reached the area where it happened. It is quite normal in these circumstances for there to be a long lapse before the facts can be sensibly established (if indeed they ever can).”

People familiar with the area, like the missionaries active around the headwaters of the Ocamo river, said it takes several days to walk to Irotatheri.

Groups of garimpeiros reportedly use helicopters to reach these remote jungle areas, and are mining under the protective canopy of trees, instead of clearing swathes of forest, to avoid being seen from the air.

That part of southern Venezuela and the border areas of the Brazilian states of Roraima and Amazonas are inhabited by some 20,000 Yanomami, one of the oldest native peoples in South America, hunters, fishers, and horticulturists who have thrived in the rainforest for up to 25,000 years.

Although they are only five percent of the global population, indigenous people account for up to 15 percent of the world’s poor, according to a new study published by members of the World Bank.

The highest percentages of indigenous people in proportion to the total national population are in China (36 percent), South Asia (32 percent) and Southeast Asia (10 percent), according to “Indigenous Peoples, Poverty, and Development”, a treatise on indigenous peoples in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

The Brookings Institute, a think tank here in Washington, recently cited figures that roughly 900 million people live in poverty – that is, they live on less than 1.25 dollars per day.

Two girls from the Chortí indigenous community in their doorway in a village in Chiquimula. Credit: Danilo Valladares/IPS

The figure underscores one of the most significant issues facing development experts today: among many of the world’s poor, economic progress is being stymied, to the amazement of some of the world’s most highly regarded and reputable economists.

“You would think that the people at the lower end of the spectrum would be making more progress, but that hasn’t been the case,” Shantayanan Devarajan, the World Bank’s chief economist for Africa, said.

While there is no universally accepted definition of what constitutes an indigenous person, Marcelo Giugale, the World Bank’s director of poverty reduction and economic matters for Africa, defines it as “people bonded together by sharing” – primarily sharing resources, culture and experiences.

Typically, the 350 million indigenous people living in the world today have a higher rate of poverty because they are marginalised economically, politically and geographically.

The United Nations (U.N.) has recently increased its focus on indigenous people, with the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) holding the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples in May to discuss how to increase the participation of indigenous peoples in politics.

“The ‘poverty trap’ is not an economic poverty trap, it’s a political one” for indigenous cultures, argued Devarajan. He pointed to apartheid as an instance where indigenous people were politically excluded solely for racial reasons.

The increased emphasis on indigenous people is due partly to the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals – among them are ending poverty and hunger, and achieving universal education, gender parity, environmental sustainability – and the concentrated effort to improve the plight of the world’s poor.

“We will not be able to overcome poverty and inequality or achieve the Millennium Development Goals in our region if we don’t improve everyone’s lives, especially the most excluded,” said Heraldo Muñoz, director for Latin America and the Caribbean at the UNDP.

He pointed to “integrated social policies, financed through more progressive fiscal structures” to help bring about the necessary change.

The lack of economic progress for indigenous communities has been particularly prominent in Latin America. According to UNDP’s 2010 Regional Human Development Report on Inequality, extreme poverty, where people live on a dollar or less per day, in Latin America and the Caribbean is twice as high among the region’s indigenous peoples.

The only sustained progress in poverty for indigenous people in Latin America was in Chile, where levels fell from around 25 percent to about 15 percent between 1996 and 2005, according to Harry Anthony Patrinos, lead education economist at the World Bank.

Nevertheless, poverty levels in Latin America as a whole are at the lowest level in 20 years, according to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

“Poverty and inequality continue to decline in the region, which is good news, particularly in the midst of an international economic crisis,” said Alicia Barcena, ECLAC’s executive secretary.

“However, this progress is threatened by the…gaps in the productive structure in the region.”

Worldwide, the greatest success among indigenous people has been in China. China has been the only place where the reduction of poverty was higher in the indigenous minority than in the majority – in this case, the Han people.

There is one theory as to why the Chinese have been so successful in this regard. “China targets regions or areas rather than people,” Patrinos explained, by offering indigenous people more programs that allow for systemic changes, rather than vague political gestures meant to garner votes.

In the United States, Native Americans have historically had a difficult relationship with the European immigrants who took over their land and eventually condemned a significant of proportion of the native population to reservations and poverty.

The latest statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau put Native American poverty levels at 25.3 percent. But in 2010, they found that comparatively, only 15.1 percent of the total population was beneath the poverty line.

Yet those who viewed themselves as indigenous – that is, of Native American blood – in the 2010 U.S. Census comprised only 1.7 percent of the total U.S. population, or 5.2 million people.

Poor treatment of Native Americans has extended into modern times. In 2000, Congress allocated 1.6 billion dollars to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, but not all of the funds were paid.

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court, by a five to four ruling, decided that the federal government was obligated to repay Native American tribes for the expenses incurred by Native Americans running federal programs such as education, homeland security and environmental protection.

Indigenous leaders from all over South America are making their way by foot, canoe and eventually on buses to be part of the Kari-Oca Caravan to Rio de Janeiro, to talk to world leaders at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, Rio+20.

“We will be representing thousands of indigenous communities from all over South America,” Moi Enomenga, a Waorani leader, told Tierramérica just before he boarded a bus in Quito, Ecuador for the nine-day bus trip to Rio. Other indigenous leaders will join in along the way.

Moi Enomenga, just before boarding a bus in Quito, Ecuador, the starting point for the caravan to Rio de Janeiro. Credit: Courtesy of Moi Enomenga

The Waorani are an Amazonian indigenous people who live in eastern Ecuador, in an area of oil drilling activity.

Rio+20 is meant to serve as an intergovernmental forum for the adoption of solutions to the global crisis of sustainability, manifested in the repeated failure of the globalised economy, a food shortage, energy problems and global environmental woes like climate change and biodiversity loss.

“For years indigenous peoples have been divided. Now we are going to unite,” said Enomenga, who was born into an uncontacted community and is now president of the Quehueri’ono Association.

“Not everyone can hear the voice of Mother Earth from the jungle, and we want to bring that voice to Rio,” added Enomenga, who said he was prepared to walk to Rio if the bus broke down.

The World Indigenous Peoples Conference on Territories, Rights and Sustainable Development or Kari-Oca II will be held Jun. 14-22 in a traditionally constructed conference village built by Brazilian indigenous peoples five kilometres from the official Rio+20 conference facility.

“Kari-Oca” means “white man’s house” in the Tupí-Guaraní language. It was the term used by the indigenous peoples living in the area where the city of Rio de Janeiro now stands to refer to the first settlements built by Portuguese colonisers.

The term also gave rise to “Carioca”, the word used to refer to inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro. Two decades ago, the first Kari-Oca conference was held parallel to the 1992 Earth Summit.

The Inter-Tribal Committee of Brazil, which is hosting the meeting, expects it to draw some 600 indigenous participants from around the world, who will prepare their message and recommendations to the high-level segment of Rio+20 taking place Jun. 20-22.

“I’m very worried about the situation of indigenous peoples globally,” said Enomenga. “It is the same story everywhere, indigenous peoples’ rights are not respected by governments. And everywhere, India, Africa, South America, there is the hunt for oil and other resources,” he added.

“We can’t keep going on the same path that we have been on the last 20 years,” said Hortencia Hidalgo Cáceres, an Aymara woman from Chile who is with the Indigenous Women’s Network of Latin America and the Caribbean for Biodiversity (RMIB).

“Real change is needed. We want to invite the world to a brighter future based on indigenous values and principles of ‘buen vivir’ (living well),” Cáceres told Tierramérica.

As opposed to the Western concept of “living better” – the belief that economic growth brings progress which in turn leads to the elimination of poverty – “buen vivir” or “living well” refers to living in harmony with nature while pursuing material, social and spiritual well-being for all members of society, but not at the cost of other members or the environment

Without adhering to these principles, the “green economy” many nations want to create as an outcome from Rio will represent a “false solution” to the crises of environmental degradation and social injustice, Cáceres said.

For Casey Box, program coordinator at the non-governmental organisation Land is Life, “Indigenous peoples have much to offer the international community as it tries to find its way forward to truly sustainable development.”

Land Is Life, an international coalition of indigenous communities and organisations based in the United States, has raised funds and helped coordinate the Kari-Oca Caravan and Summit.

“The goals of Rio+20 will be impossible to achieve without the traditional knowledge and long-established resource management practices of indigenous peoples,” said Box.

As many as 50,000 people are expected at Rio+20, including more than 130 heads of state and government. It is being held 20 years after the UN Conference on Environment and Development, or Earth Summit, hosted by the same city. The 1992 summit gave birth to three major environmental treaties on climate change, biodiversity and desertification.

More than 700 indigenous peoples joined the first Kari-Oca summit held in 1992 prior to the Earth Summit. It marked the birth of an international movement for indigenous peoples’ rights, and succeeded in gaining recognition for their important role in conservation and sustainable development.

“We are excited about going to Rio because there is an indigenous peoples’ space where we can talk about our concerns and share our knowledge and experience,” said Cáceres.

It will take 60 hours by bus for indigenous participants from Patagonia in southern Chile to reach La Paz, Bolivia. There they will join Enomenga and the others from the north, arriving from Ecuador via Peru.

The Kari-Oca Caravan will then take a good five days to cross the Andes and travel through Bolivia, Paraguay and southern Brazil to get to Rio on the Atlantic coast.

Indigenous peoples are eager to participate because it is only at such international meetings where they have the opportunity to be heard by government leaders and the public, Cáceres says. “When we come home these doors are closed.”

By going to Rio and expressing their views there, Enomenga and others from Ecuador are hoping their government will have greater respect for indigenous peoples’ rights and perspectives.

“There are two uncontacted communities near my home but there is the threat of oil exploration. They don’t want this. For them, taking the oil out of the ground is like taking blood out of their bodies,” he said.

The delegates also intend to denounce government initiatives they consider harmful.

Gloria Ushigua, president of the Association of Zápara Women, said that Ecuador’s “Socio Bosque” program, implemented by the Ministry of Environment to combat deforestation, has caused many problems for local communities.

The Zápara nation is located in the eastern part of the province of Pastaza, in the Amazon rainforest region of eastern Ecuador.

“My hope is to share my community’s story and discuss territory rights,” Ushigua said in a release.

Also in the Caravan is Celso Aranda from Sarayaku, a Kichwa territory in Pastaza, who is bringing a proposal called Kawsak Sacha, or Living Forests, to Kari-Oca.

This proposal is the Sarayaku people’s response to climate change and the destruction of nature, and describes how indigenous communities can protect ecosystems by maintaining ancestral land management practices.

After Kari-Oca II and Rio+20, “indigenous peoples will continue to work in our communities to strengthen our cultures and resist exploitation of our territories,” said Enomenga.

“We have a very clear message. Leave everything beneath the Earth.”

*The writer is an IPS correspondent. This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

“Midwives in Guatemala attend to women during pregnancy, the birth and the post-partum period. They give the women warmth and support, because they speak the same language and belong to the same culture,” said Silvia Xinico with the Network of Organisations of Indigenous Women for Reproductive Health.

Xinico, a member of the Cakchiquel indigenous community, told IPS that the midwives “are treated as part of the family; they give people advice about how to solve their difficulties.” They are also called on when there is a health problem in the community.

Most indigenous women in Guatemala use the services of midwives. Credit:Danilo Valladares/IPS

The important role played by local midwives is reflected in the official statistics, which show that nearly half of all births in this Central American country are attended by midwives.

The 2008-2009 National Maternal-Infant Health Survey reported that 48 percent of pregnancies in the country were attended in the homes of the expectant mother or the midwife. But in departments (provinces) where most of the population is indigenous, the proportion reached almost 80 percent.

The survey also indicated that 43 percent of births took place in public hospitals and clinics, and just under eight percent in private health facilities.

The Health Ministry reported that midwives attended 45.7 percent of the 115,997 births registered in the country from January to October 2011.

The National Survey on Living Conditions carried out last year reported that 54 percent of Guatemala’s 14 million people live in poverty and 13 percent in extreme poverty.

The worst poverty and lack of public services, healthcare and education are concentrated in indigenous provinces. (According to official statistics, 40 percent of Guatemala’s population of 14 million is indigenous, although native organisations put the proportion at over 60 percent.)

Despite the important role they play in providing healthcare, Guatemala’s traditional midwives are sometimes denigrated. “Because they are indigenous, they are discriminated against and treated with scorn by staff in the public health services” to which they turn when patients with complications must be transferred to the hospital, Xinico said.

“The doctors don’t let us go in the hospital, they only let the patient in, which makes us feel bad,” said Regina Patzán, a native midwife from San Juan Comalapa in the central department of Chimaltenango.

This happens even though many of the expectant mothers do not speak Spanish, only their native language, she told IPS.

Patzán, who has been a midwife for 16 years, says her skills are a gift from God.

“When I was just a little girl I wanted to know how babies came into the world. My great-grandmothers and my grandparents would get angry when I asked them,” she said, adding that she was even whipped a couple of times for asking about “adult things.”

But she was determined to know. “I wanted to receive the children when they were born,” she said. So she got involved in a non-governmental organisation, and was trained as a midwife, seeing her dream come true.

“When women come with complications, we immediately send them to the hospital. We are also visited by 14- or 15-year-old girls who come in with a stomach ache and we explain that it’s menstruation,” she said.

Her hunger for knowledge remains intact. “We would like to learn how to detect haemorrhaging when we are in the village and how we can help the women,” she said.

María Clara Mux, 55, another midwife from Chimaltenango, inherited her craft from her grandmother. “The first birth I attended was my daughter-in-law’s, because I had seen how my grandmother did it. Thank God everything went well. My grandson is now 13 years old,” she told IPS.

She strongly emphasises the need for family planning. “Now there are many planning methods to use. It’s not like before, when families had 16 kids. Things are difficult and we have to pay for school, clothing and food,” she said.

Mux is now receiving training at the local health centre and continues to help pregnant women and attend births, although she does so in precarious conditions.

“We need equipment – gloves, scissors and a syringe. The Health Ministry gave us some, but they eventually wear out. We also need a lantern, because some people don’t even have electricity and we can’t see a thing.”

The absence of health services in the most remote parts of the country means midwives play a key role in preventing maternal deaths.

Aracely Tórtola with the Asociación Pro Bienestar de la Familia de Guatemala – the Guatemalan association of family welfare, a local NGO – said the midwives “play a very important role in society, helping to curb maternal mortality, because many women are in areas where there are no hospitals.”

“These women also face economic and cultural hurdles to gaining access to hospitals,” the expert said.

Tórtola said midwives should receive training and education in the rights of women, family planning methods, prevention of sexually transmitted diseases, prevention of risks, and breastfeeding.

“If the midwife provides good advice and information, if she tells women that they have a right to family planning, if she takes them to the hospital when the pregnancy is at risk, she is helping bring down the maternal mortality rate,” she said.

The latest available statistics, from the national survey on maternal mortality published in December 2011, indicate that the maternal mortality rate fell from 153 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2000 to 139 deaths in 2007.

But the ratio is three times higher among indigenous women, the Observatory on Sexual and Reproductive Health reports.

Leonor Calderón, the delegate of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in Guatemala, commented to IPS that women play a fundamental role in society because of their contribution to maternal health. She said the state should recognise their skills and knowledge.

Calderón described traditional midwives as “agents of development” because of the social role they play in attending births, reducing maternal mortality and encouraging family planning.

A unique response to the challenge of global warming is happening in rural areas of Peru, where a network of indigenous elders is working out how to adjust weather forecasts in the light of climate change, while taking measures to safeguard their crops.

Guardians of the potato crop in Huama, Cuzco inspect frost and drought damage in the fields. Credit:Milagros Salazar/IPS

“Before, things happened at the right time. Now, strange things are going on with the climate.” This is the kind of comment that is heard frequently in dozens of rural communities throughout the departments (provinces) of Puno, Cuzco and Apurímac in the country’s southern Andean highlands.

Campesinos (small farmers) in these highland areas, where the vast majority of the population is indigenous, are increasingly concerned about the sudden changes in weather that affect traditional crops like potato, maize or quinoa.

“People are clearly aware that the rains arrive early or late, the wells dry out quickly, frosts come at any time, the soil is more compacted due to the heat and because water does not infiltrate into the soil to the same extent,” sociologist Ricardo Claverías with the Centre for Research, Education and Development (CIED) told IPS.

Since the 1980s, the CIED has worked to protect and preserve the traditional knowledge of campesinos in a score of communities in Puno.

“We know the climate is changing by looking at nature. For example, up until 10 years ago, that ‘apu’ (mountain peak) had snow on its crest all year round,” Valentín Ccahuana, leader of the Ccasacancha community in Apurímac, told representatives of the United Nations Joint Programme on Climate Change in Cuzco.

But indigenous campesinos in the highlands have developed a wealth of traditional knowledge over generations from observation of bioindicators, like the behaviour of plants and animals.

“Their accumulated experience gives them an edge on dealing with the challenges posed by climate change today,” Edwin Mansilla, head of the environmental management division of the Cuzco regional government, told IPS.

Some elders have developed expertise in climate forecasting. In Puno, they are between the ages of 60 and 75, according to research undertaken by Claverías.

In Cuzco, too, discerning weather trends tends to be a function of older members of the community, although some of the local forecasters are as young as 30 years old. “If the community elects them, young people can take on this role,” Flora Salas, a leader of the Cuzco village of Huañaccahua, told IPS.

The traditional weather forecasters are known as “arariwa” in Quechua, translated as “guardian of the fields”.

A village of 100 to 150 families in Puno may have 20 arariwas, according to Claverías. They share information with their counterparts in other communities, and thus build up a network.

The exchange of information traverses the Andes mountain chain. Claverías states that campesinos working as seasonal agricultural labourers in the Pacific coastal region of the country make a point of returning to their communities to share their weather observations.

The wise elders hold meetings and keep formal minutes of their predictions and their recommendations for which crops should be sown in the coming months. On the basis of these pronouncements, the community organises itself and reaches decisions that everyone must respect.

An arariwa reads the signs that are written in nature. If a wild cactus species with edible fruit, called sancayo, produces abundant flowers in August, it is a sign the potato harvest will be good. And if the qanlla plant grows densely in November, there will be plenty of quinoa and cañihua – protein-rich grains – in April or May.

If certain birds build their nests high up on the floating reed islands on Lake Titicaca (on the border with Bolivia), there will be plenty of rain, but if they nest low down on the islands, there will be drought. And when seagulls can be heard, a storm is coming, and people run for shelter.

Although traditional wisdom is mentioned as a factor in Peru’s national strategy on climate change, the government lacks a specific policy to incorporate it. However, some regional authorities and especially municipal authorities do work with local campesinos on this problem, several sources told IPS.

The aim of Claverías’ study “Conocimientos de los campesinos andinos sobre los predictores climáticos: Elementos para su verificación” (Andean Peasant Knowledge of Climate Predictors: Foundations for Verification), was to salvage and systematise knowledge that “is being lost,” recognise its importance and “identify gaps, weaknesses and inconsistencies” in an attempt to “validate, improve and develop it by means of modern science.”

Claverías describes the indicators used by Puno campesino communities to predict the weather in the 1989-1990 agricultural season, when there was a severe drought, and in 1997-1998, when there was a major El Niño event – a cyclical climate phenomenon characterised by unusual warming of the waters of the Pacific ocean, which impacts weather over many areas of the globe.

Then he compares the margin of error of the arariwas’ predictions with those of scientists and official bodies. He found that in most cases, the traditional elders’ forecasts were accurate.

However, Claverías warns that “the degree of accuracy of traditional knowledge is declining” for a number of reasons. One is climate change itself and other environmental transformations, which in turn bring about changes “in the behaviour of wild fauna and flora, and these synergistic changes cannot yet be interpreted by the campesinos.”

A similar disruption of traditional knowledge can be observed in indigenous communities in other countries, like Colombia.

In addition, the poverty in these communities means that their members have to do different types of work in order to survive – in cities, or as seasonal farm workers in other regions – which is distancing them from contact with nature. And their predictions “are interpretations limited to a single eco-region and cannot be generalised to a wider area,” the study says.

In response to these limitations, several arariwas “are fine-tuning their observations and discovering new bioindicators to be taken into account,” as well as further prevention measures, said Mansilla, the Cuzco government official.

Campesinos are developing adaptation methods, such as planting earlier or later to match the rain patterns of recent years, growing crops in different ecological niches to test their resistance, and diversifying the crops they cultivate.

“Many agricultural experts used to ask small farmers to plant monocultures (of a single species), but now we realise they were right, and we believe it is best to plant multiple varieties, as a better means of managing risk,” Mansilla told IPS.

In Huañaccahua the community decided to plant two crops of potato at different times, based on the rainfall pattern over the last three years. “And it has worked well,” the 39-year-old community leader, Salas, told IPS.

Travelling in rural areas, IPS found that campesinos blame climate change on the neglect of cultural practices, such as ceremonial payments to Pachamama (Mother Earth), or on the environmental damage that human beings have caused.

“Young people nowadays do not respect Pachamama, and do not give her thanks for everything she gives us. It is time to reflect on how to help the Earth, and how to help human beings continue to live in harmony with nature,” Ccahuana said.

But although people are nostalgic about the old ways, the campesinos are nevertheless entering the market system, through improved crops with increased yields, or by manufacturing and selling dairy products, so that their families are not dependent solely on what their small farms produce, Claverías said.

In his study he recommends “uniting both cultures (science and ancestral knowledge) to predict the climate with greater accuracy” and to achieve “more consistent and apposite proposals for rural development.”

“Climate change is both a challenge and an opportunity,” he concluded.

*This article is part of a series supported by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN).