Friday, May 9, 2008

Defining and Defending Our Land

Land is at the core of the survival and well-being of Indigenous Peoples. It is our spiritual foundation that shapes our cultures and secures a basis for self-determination. This is why indigenous peoples around the world have struggled throughout history to define and defend their lands and to hold them in trust for future generations.

By: Lucy Mulenkei, Indigenous Peoples Caucus

Land is at the core of the survival and well-being of Indigenous Peoples. It is our spiritual foundation that shapes our cultures and secures a basis for self-determination. This is why indigenous peoples around the world have struggled throughout history to define and defend their lands and to hold them in trust for future generations. Land rights are major issue faced by Indigenous Peoples, and they are at the centre of numerous conflict involving indigenous communities, farmers, multinational corporation and governments, particularly as a result of globalization. Due to the increased emphasis on biofuel production and the demands of the industrialized world for fuel, the battle to protect the lands on which indigenous peoples livelihoods, culture and future depends has never been more critical.

Access to and protection of traditional lands and water rights, the continuation of traditional practices, and conservation of indigenous seed stocks are prerequisites to food security and the eradication of hunger. Traditional indigenous food production relies on cooperative collective harvesting and distribution, ensuring that everyone receives an equitable share and those surpluses given to those most in need. Indigenous peoples’ lands have long been exploited for oil, gas and coal to supply an unsustainable fossil fuel economy that is the major cause of climate change and global warming.

Today, indigenous territories are increasingly being targeted for biofuel production as an answer to climate change mitigation. There is still a lack of stastitical research on the number of people are at risk of losing their lands as a result of biofuel production, but in one Indonesian provide –West Kailmantan—the UN has identified five million indenous people who will likely be displaced because of biofuel crop expansion. This is likely to become a familiar story as the demand for agrofuels becomes more persistent. This is in spite of the research studies which have demonstrated that large, industrial-scale monoculture production of biofuel crops - destroy fragile ecosystems, threaten biodiversity, concentrate corporate power, increase inequities in rural communities and ultimately turn precious land from a food crop into a fuel crop.

Cure or curse?

Conventionally, nature resource endowment is thought of as a blessing, bringing employment, investment and services. However, whilst most of the natural resources in the world are found in Indigenous peoples land and territories. In Africa and Asia resource rich areas located in indigenous territory has led to forced removal and displacement of tribal communities and the abolition of traditional lifestyles, whilst the only areas of land that have been protected from the ravages of business and industry are located in semi arid lands.

All peoples have a right to be secure in their means of subsistence. All Traditional livelihood systems, such as pastoralism, rotational agriculture, hunting and gathering and agroforestry, are discriminated against by modern agriculture and rural development — undermining continued viability of these systems and deepening Indigenous Peoples marginalization and poverty.

Call for action

Pastoralism must be recognized and supported as a viable system. There are three million pastoralists in Africa practicing a dynamic form of land use and refined resource management system. As a livelihood system, it incorporates production, trade and social welfare mechanisms. However, national development planning excludes pastoral peoples’ views, leading to a lack of viable markets, a devaluation of livestock (which is equivalent to the exchange rate in pastoralist systems); curtailment of mobility and range use and take-over as protected areas; enforced settlements and urban emigration; alienation of the younger generation and loss of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and traditional institutions; and aid dependence syndrome. As a result, no real self-determined development has been possible.

Faced with these issues and challenges, but not giving up, pastoralist societies have for many years put in place adaptation measures such as livestock diversification (camels), agro-pastoralism (irrigation), livestock/other trade, migration and waged labor, and investment in child education, for their advancement.

The term “rotational farming” instead of “shifting cultivation” seeks to counter State discourse against this indigenous livelihood system, emphasizing the cyclical farming and fallow periods over indigenous territory. Rotational farming continues to be widely practiced among many indigenous peoples, based on holistic knowledge systems linking people to the land, forest, wildlife, and the spiritual world.

Eradication programs targeting shifting cultivation have resulted in loss of food security, the deteriorating quality of nutrition, the loss of plant diversity and, most importantly, a host of social and cultural impacts— such as the erosion of ceremonial life, reduction or dissolution of communal labor exchange and cooperation, privatization of land ownership and individualization of production, increased socio-economic inequality, increasing conflicts, and general erosion of social cohesion and communal identity.

Indigenous peoples’ lives are intertwined with land and forest. However, indigenous peoples engaged in agro-forestry face highly exclusionary forestry laws. The historical legacy of colonial forestry where the State controls forests to the exclusion of community rights and interests remains deeply rooted today. For example, some 22% of the national territory of India, some 40% of Thailand’s national territory, some 55% in the Philippines and 70% of the country in Indonesia is classified as State Forest Areas. A similar pattern prevails in much of Africa and increasingly, in Latin America.

The traditionally Pygmy peoples from Africa, for example, have lived in small nomadic bands in the forest, hunting and gathering forest products and exchanging these with settled farming communities for salt, metal tools and other items. Their forest territories extended thousands of hectares, but have never been formally recognised either in state law or the customary laws of farming communities. Pygmy peoples are now facing unprecedented pressures on their lands, forest resources and societies as forests are logged, cleared for agriculture or turned into exclusive wildlife conservation areas. They are becoming outcasts on the edge of dominant society as they become settled in villages; increasingly dependent on the cash economy, but unable to enjoy the rights accorded to other citizens and marginalized in policies and decision-making. As these pressures intensify, Pygmy peoples are suffering increasing poverty, racial discrimination, violence and cultural collapse. Throughout Central Africa their traditional way of life is disappearing and their incomparable knowledge of the forest is being lost.

Discussions in CSD should move from theory to action. Reaching out for the needy and including them in the process. Governments should change policies and be more positive if they have to meet any targets they have for fighting poverty. The recent adoption by the General Assembly of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples provides a universal framework and the necessary foundation, for securing our rights to lands, waters, resources, and calling for the full and effective participation in decision-making on sustainable development, at all levels.