community-based resource
management
The UN Universal Declaration on Human
Rights states that: “Everyone has the right
to a standard of living adequate for the
health and wellbeing of himself and of his
family, including food, clothing, housing
and medical care.” Yet for many people
living in already impoverished countries,
access to and control over the very
resources they need to provide for their
families is declining, with little or no
compensation in the form of finance or
social security.
Friends of the Earth International is
calling for fair and sustainable economies
with new economic goals, including the
equitable and sustainable use of limited
resources and the recognition of the
importance of economic diversity.
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Communities, including indigenous
peoples, small farmers, landless
peasants and women, should have
equitable access to agricultural
land, water, seeds and other
productive resources, and the ability
to make decisions concerning the use
of those resources.
We also want new devolved,
transparent and participatory
economic decision-making processes
based on the principle of economic
subsidiarity. This means that
communities can choose the extent to
which they are selfreliant,
generating their own wealth and jobs,
yet retaining the option to
trade.
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Creating democratic and sustainable
economies is an ambitious goal that can
only be realized by ensuring that
international policies genuinely reflect
and address peoples'hopes, needs and
aspirations. To achieve this, political
decentralization is essential. It will be
absolutely necessary to ensure that nations
and communities are the key
decision-makers; that all relevant
decision-making bodies – from the local
through to the international – are
genuinely representative of women and men
and participatory; and that people have
real opportunities to develop
themselves.
Many initiatives based on sustainable
economies and local control over resources
are already underway. In Ghana , women's
activities have been diversified to include
shea butter processing and trade of beans
and groundnuts with other regions, and they
have also reinvigorated traditional
decisionmaking processes at the community
level (
see page 35
). In Chile, the Pehuenche indigenous
peoples are designing communitybased
development projects including a health
clinic and a storehouse for pine-nuts in
order to improve their living conditions
(see
page 8
).
On the island of Atauro (formerly part
of East Timor), people have decided to use
their resources sustainably and only allow
small-scale income-generating activities.
In order to increase their
self-determination, communities in Cameroon
and Malaysia are engaged in participatory
mapping initiatives which allow them to
document the importance of natural
resources in their subsistence strategies
(see
page 7
and
page 13
). In El
Salvador and Paraguay , communities have
reinvigorated the cultivation of medicinal
plants which are threatened by the loss of
biodiversity. (see
page
34
and
page 36
)
