Thread: The Implementation of Agenda 21 and Indigenous Peoples

http://www.un-ngls.org/documents/public ... a21/02.htm

Implementing Agenda 21

The Implementation of Agenda 21 and Indigenous Peoples
by Victoria Tauli-Corpuz

This article will identify general trends of Agenda 21 implementation. During the 14th session of the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations, held in Geneva from 29 July-2 August l996, indigenous peoples met and agreed to make a more comprehensive review, which will be given to the UN Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) during its five-year review of Agenda 21 in June l997.
If the rhetoric of Agenda 21 and the Rio Declaration of Principles are truly implemented, undoubtedly these will have positive impacts on indigenous peoples. Principle 22 of the Rio declaration states;
"Indigenous people and their communities and other local communities have a vital role in environmental management and development because of their knowledge and traditional practices. States should recognize and duly support their identity, culture, and interests and enable their effective participation in sustainable development."1
The declaration acknowledged that unsustainable patterns of production and consumption should be reduced to achieve sustainable development (Principle . This is important because it is an admission that the prevailing development paradigm is unsustainable; therefore, elements of these or the whole paradigm should be altered. Indigenous peoples have questioned this kind of development since colonization.
UNCED was a watershed because it looked at environment and development in an integrated fashion. It linked issues such as poverty, inequity, unequal trade and the debt crisis to environmental degradation. Indigenous peoples have always had a holistic view of the world.
From the indigenous peoples' perspective, the major weakness of the Rio documents is that they still operate within the framework of the dominant development paradigm, which regards economic growth through more competitive and liberalized markets as the way to development. UNCED is about looking for the balance between economic growth and environmental sustainability. It was not about questioning the economic growth model as the main reason for environmental degradation.
One aspect which is glaringly absent from the documents is the whole issue of mining. For many indigenous peoples, mining of minerals and oil remains the main economic activity in their communities that has resulted in massive environmental degradation and economic disasters. Although mining is one of the most unsustainable activities of land and resource management, chapter 10 of Agenda 21 on "Integrated Approach to the Planning and Management of Land Resources," makes no reference to mineral lands. Obviously, this whole issue was conveniently avoided because large-scale commercial mining cannot pass the test of environmental sustainability.
Another weakness of Agenda 21 and other UNCED documents is the lack of affirmation of our inherent rights to self-determination and our ancestral territories and resources. We believe that our capacity to contribute effectively to attaining a sustainable planet is directly linked to the recognition and respect of these rights.
The Significance of Chapter 26
When we started lobbying during the PrepComs, we did not intend to have a separate chapter on indigenous peoples, because this can "ghettoize" our concerns. We attempted to ensure that the issues and perspectives of indigenous peoples were reflected in all the chapters. However, when it was apparent that our influence over the other chapters was minimal, we changed our approach to strengthen further chapter 26.
Nevertheless, the inclusion of indigenous peoples as one of the major groups was important. This chapter brought indigenous peoples into the whole sustainable development discourse. It also gave additional bite to our lobbying at the subsequent UN conferences and at the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations. Furthermore, it reinforced the legitimacy of our fight for our rights to ancestral lands and territories and self-determination.
Whatever we gained in the final documents that came out of Rio can be partly credited to the lobbying we did and to the efforts of some advocates from the NGOs and governments. However, the real credit should be given to indigenous peoples from the past and present generations who have sustained the struggles to defend our territories and our sustainable lifestyles amidst tremendous pressures from modern society.
What Has Happened Four Years After Rio?
After lobbying by indigenous peoples, the United Nations declared 1993 as the International Year of the World's Indigenous People. Subsequently, the International Decade of the World's Indigenous People was declared. Some UN agencies such as UNESCO designated special focal points for indigenous peoples, and the International Labour Office (ILO) set up an Inter-regional Programme to Support Self-Reliance of Indigenous and Tribal Communities through Cooperatives and Other Self-Help Organizations. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) provided support to governments, some NGOs and indigenous peoples' organizations and facilitated regional meetings among indigenous peoples between l994 and l995.
Multilateral financial institutions, such as the World Bank, produced policy papers on indigenous peoples. While the papers recognize that indigenous peoples should be consulted or involved in project development, the institutions' track record in terms of really addressing indigenous peoples' concerns is very poor. In fact, they played key roles in marginalizing and displacing indigenous peoples from their lands. Since multilateral banks exist to promote the market economy, the projects they support undermine indigenous peoples' subsistence production systems, cosmology or worldview, and value systems.
Many conflicts have erupted between indigenous peoples and governments with bank-supported projects, and the injustices committed by these institutions should be addressed if they want to develop partnerships with indigenous peoples. If these multilateral financial institutions still insist on just promoting the neo-liberal market paradigm, there is not much hope that indigenous peoples can relate with them without sacrificing their rights.
Some governments such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Norway have a representative of indigenous peoples in their delegations to UN conferences and sessions like the CSD. Some donor governments, such as the Netherlands, have produced policy papers on indigenous peoples and have allotted money for indigenous peoples' organizations.
However, on the whole I think the majority of indigenous peoples will say that Rio did not really make a significant dent in arresting environmental degradation in our communities. In fact, immediately after Rio we can cite case after case of how governments, transnational corporations and other multilateral agencies like the World Bank and the IMF violated Agenda 21.
Continuing Conflicts over Control of Territory and Resources
Many conflicts today are over resources found on indigenous peoples' lands. Many Third World countries still rely largely on extracting primary natural resources to trade with richer nations. Most of the remaining lands, which are still considered frontier lands, are ancestral territories of indigenous peoples. We continue to be sacrificed for the sake of national interests. This is the story of indigenous peoples from colonization up to the present. The only difference between then and now is rhetoric such as acknowledging indigenous peoples' roles in sustainable development, and the importance of indigenous and traditional knowledge, which is found in many documents of the UN, the World Bank and governments. Many are paying lip service to indigenous peoples and sustainable development. But the practice has remained basically the same. Our rights to have control over our lands and resources are blatantly violated even now in the name of sustainable development. Trade liberalization, which is the obsession of many countries, has aggravated such conflicts.
For example, in the Philippines, the revised Mining Code now known as the Philippine Mining Act of l995 (Republic Act 7942) was signed into law on 6 March l995. Among other things, the law provides for 100% foreign equity in mining investments, leases for 50-75 years over huge tracts of mineral lands, and 100% repatriation of profits for foreign corporations. Even before this was signed, there have already been 54 applications from foreign mining corporations. The bulk of the mineral lands up for grabs is found in the ancestral territories of ten million indigenous peoples and Moros (Muslims).
And in Brazil, Decree 1775 has just been passed. It opened up 344 reserves or 57% of indigenous peoples' lands, to claims by any person, company or local authority who think they may have a case. This decree contradicts Article 231 of the Brazil constitution, which recognizes the inalienable right of indigenous peoples to their ancestral lands and natural resources. Since the decree was enacted in 1996 loggers, miners, ranchers and others are filing injunctions to reverse indigenous land titles.2
In Nigeria, the traditional economic base of the Ogoni people has been ruined by the Shell Oil Company's drilling of over 900 million barrels of oil. Ogoni traditional lands are ruined beyond rescue. The people continue to live in dire poverty, and they still do not have electric lights. Kenule Saro-Wiwa, the head of the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP) and eight others sacrificed their lives to assert their rights to have control over their territory.
These are all post-UNCED developments. The ratification of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the setting up of the World Trade Organization (WTO) have major implications for the implementation of Agenda 21. Member states have to adhere to the requirement that national laws be consistent with GATT rules. The liberalization of investment laws automatically conflicts with the ancestral land rights of indigenous peoples. Mining has always been an investment that ensures tremendous profits. Therefore, indigenous peoples living on mineral lands are experiencing more aggressive incursions into their lands.
From the late 1940s to the 1980s, dam building has been a major area for World Bank lending. The World Bank reports say around 350,000 people may be displaced by dams it funded between l994 and l996. Evidence of aggressive dam construction can be seen in all parts of the world.
In Brazil, 400 Maaxi Indians in Carapara 11 were driven out of their villages to make way for the construction of the Cotingo River Hydroelectric Dam. And the Bakun Dam in Malaysia will require the clear cutting of 80,000 hectares of rainforest and forced displacement of 5,000-8,000 indigenous peoples from 15 communities. The legacy of 50 years of dam building shows that mega-hydroelectric dams are unsustainable, yet loans and funds continue to be made for such projects. For indigenous peoples, dams are not environmentally sustainable nor socially acceptable, so they are resisting them.
Bioprospecting, Intellectual Property Rights, Human Genome Diversity Project
Since UNCED, many indigenous peoples have been fighting against the systematic appropriation of their biological and human genetic resources. Appropriation is done in the name of conserving biodiversity, and various instruments are used to legitimize it. The WTO Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement (TRIPS), which allows for patenting of life-forms, is the most dangerous instrument.
Transnational corporations and governments have discovered that genetic and biological resources are "gold mines." Many of our sacred lands and burial grounds have been ravaged beyond rehabilitation by traditional mining. Now, the new form of prospecting is bioprospecting, which invades and colonizes the sacred spaces, not only of our plants and animals, but of our own bodies. Bioprospecting activities are carried out aggressively in our lands. The science of biotechnology, particularly genetic engineering, has provided the impetus for commodifying and commercializing genetic resources.
TRIPS has provided the legal framework for this appropriation and commercialization to take place. TRIPS awards intellectual property rights (IPRs), such as patents, to private entities who have "innovated" a product and can reproduce it on a commercial scale. It automatically excludes most indigenous peoples from being granted IPRs. Many of their practices don't fit within the framework of TRIPS since communal sharing of genetic resources, which regard knowledge as social, collective and cumulative. Therefore it cannot be appropriated by a single individual.
Transnational pharmaceutical, agribusiness, and biotechnology corporations cut their research expenses significantly by acquiring indigenous knowledge about indigenous seeds and medicinal plants. They compensate indigenous peoples to harvest the plants, and once the plants arrive at the corporations' laboratories, the process of innovation and patenting follows. This situation is not any different when indigenous small-scale miners are used to trace mineral ore veins; when the mining prospectors obtain this knowledge, they take over, and indigenous peoples end up as the miners. In bioprospecting, we end up as the harvesters of the medicinal plants and, in the Human Genome Diversity Project, we ourselves become the raw materials.
Recognition of the sovereign rights of states to have control over their own biological resources is important, because it counters the Northern agenda of regarding biodiversity as the global commons. However, the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities over their biodiversity is not equally addressed. It is important to balance the possible abuse of the states in allowing the appropriation and exploitation of this biodiversity by the local elite or transnational corporations. Some nation-states claim sovereignty over these resources, only to offer them to the highest bidders who are mostly foreign investors.
For example, the main issue under discussion in the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) is how to share equitably the benefits accruing from biodiversity. But the key issue for indigenous peoples is how the state and the international community guarantee our rights to have control over the resources, and how we should use it and share them.
The importance of conserving biodiversity was stressed in chapter 15 of Agenda 21, but recommendations for biodiversity conservation are very limited. These range from setting up integrated protected area systems to valuing biodiversity, which acknowledges the roles of indigenous peoples in conserving this biodiversity and recommends that these roles be strengthened. However, discussing biodiversity conservation outside of the framework of recognizing the rights of indigenous peoples to their lands and resources is meaningless.
Transnational corporations and industrialized countries look primarily at biodiversity as raw material for the biotechnology industry. Thus, following the same pattern of how ancestral lands, territories and resources of indigenous peoples were appropriated, legal frameworks to justify such appropriations are being put into place. The only difference is that Public Land Laws and Mining Codes were legislated at the national level.
This time the legal framework for the appropriation of genetic resources is negotiated internationally. Governments should harmonize their laws with these international agreements reached in the Uruguay Round. Regional economic agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) are following the same track, and it seems that what has not been achieved globally at the GATT/WTO will be opened up at regional levels.
Indigenous peoples have sponsored on their own, or in coordination with other NGOs or UN agencies, discussions and conferences on intellectual property rights. Almost all of the conferences have arrived at a common conclusion: the intellectual property rights regime of WTO is a Northern concept, which is antithetical to the world view and practice of indigenous peoples.
While we are trying to lobby the UN, CBD, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO), and others to provide protection to our genetic resources and indigenous knowledge, the mad race to collect medicinal plants, seeds, and indigenous knowledge is on. Bilateral genetic prospecting agreements are already being forged between biopirates, universities, unsuspecting indigenous peoples' communities or organizations, and unscrupulous individuals. While many bioprospecting corporations claim they are concerned with the welfare of indigenous peoples, even the seemingly best arrangements end up with indigenous peoples feeling cheated, exploited and manipulated.
The Human Genome Diversity Project has been condemned by many indigenous peoples all over the world as one of most despicable projects targeting indigenous peoples. Indigenous peoples refer to this as the "Vampire Project." We are told that because many of us are on the verge of extinction, our genetic material has to be collected as these are "isolates of historic interest," and we should allow our DNA to be collected for the sake of medical science. In my opinion the project symbolizes the ultimate colonization of indigenous peoples and the destruction of their values and traditions. However, in spite of worldwide protests, the collection of genetic materials is still taking place, and the patenting of indigenous peoples' cell lines has happened already. On 14 March l995, the genes of an indigenous person from the Hagahai tribe of Papua New Guinea was awarded U.S. patent no. 5,397,696. The Hagahai, who are now only around 260 people, find that their DNA;the building block of their very identity;is the property of the government of the USA.
Conclusion
The picture I have presented is evidence enough to say that Agenda 21 has not been implemented to the satisfaction of indigenous peoples. In many areas, the situation has deteriorated even further. The ongoing conflicts in indigenous peoples' lands, which revolve around the conflict over land and resources, is proof that governments have not really internalized and implemented what they have signed in Rio. The competition is stiff over who should have control over the fast-depleting resources of the world. Ironically, indigenous peoples who have protected these resources are not accorded even the minimum instruments to continue effectively their roles as stewards or custodians of the earth.
There is no strong evidence to show that there is genuine political will to really implement Agenda 21. More often than not, when economic interests are challenged by environmental considerations, the environment is sacrificed. Worst, when mainstream development is challenged by us, we are branded as subversives, which gives those in power the license to violate our basic human rights. Principles 10, 14, and 22 of the Rio declaration, and chapter 26 of Agenda 21 have been blatantly violated, as we can see from the cases cited. Genuine consultation and involvement of indigenous peoples, which is stressed in chapter 26, is hardly done. Involvement of indigenous peoples is only allowed if they agree with the projects designed for them.
In spite of the gloomy picture described earlier, there are still positive developments upon which we can build our hopes. Notwithstanding the tremendous limitations in resources, numbers, and expertise, etc., we have shown that we can participate equally and effectively in lobbying the international bodies and conferences. Before Rio, the lobbying of indigenous peoples was concentrated at the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations. Now, we have lobbied at the conferences that followed Rio. However, we need to further build up our capabilities to do lobbying and advocacy work. We look at the Agenda 21 as a building block that can be used towards the recognition and respect for our rights.
However, more importantly we have also seen that many indigenous peoples have persisted in their resistance against development projects and policies that are going to be detrimental to them. Our capacity to say no at the community level should be reinforced many times over. Our right to veto projects that we think are detrimental to us should be accorded. Whatever achievements we have at the international level will be meaningless if our people on the ground have lost the will to assert their rights and demands.
Notes
l. Agenda 21: Programme of Action for Sustainable Development. United Nations Department of Public Information, New York, 1992.
2. Cultural Survival Quarterly (Spring l996), Cultural Survival,Inc., Cambridge (Massachusetts), 1996.
3. Final statement of a regional meeting on Intellectual Property Rights and Biodiversity, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, 28-30 September 1994.
3. Earth Summit Briefings, Third World Network, Penang, 1992.
3. Ethics and Agenda, United Nations Environment Programme, New York,1994.
4. Multinational Monitor (April l996), Essential Information, Inc., Washington DC, 1996.
5. Tauli-Corpuz, Victoria, Asian Indigenous Peoples' Perspectives on Environment and Development, UNCED Secretariat, New York, l991.
6. Tauli-Corpuz, Victoria, Mining Indigenous Peoples' Lands, Minds, and Bodies, Unpublished speech presented at the International Forum On Globalization, George Washington University, Washington DC, May l996.
7. Third World Resurgence, Issue No. 70 (KDN PP 6738/1/96, June 1996), Third World Network, Penang, 1996.

The UN gets all its money from Western Europe and the USA. When that is all cut off in 12 years, this nonsense will stop.....

Koffi annon still in charge, when his son was in Oil for Food up to his neck.....godalmighty...

When that is all cut off in 12 years

Its already happening. The United States at least proposed non payment for certain areas we have previously paid into until the U.N. Cleaned up its act. I don't know if it was actually passed or what has occured. I just know I've seen that in several congressional documents.