biodiversity for sale: trade undermines
indigenous and community rights
simone lovera, firends of the earth
international
Recognition of and respect for the
rights of indigenous peoples and local
communities regarding the forests and other
ecosystems they live in is a pre-condition
for sustainable development. It is also
widely recognized nowadays that indigenous
peoples and local communities are very
effective managers of the surrounding
natural resources.
community-based ecosystem
management
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In countries such as Colombia ,
large biodiversity-rich areas like
the Amazon forest have been handed
over to indigenous peoples. It has
been acknowledged that these peoples'
traditional knowledge and
methodologies are preserving
biodiversity in a much more effective
manner than are the artificial
management plans drawn up in distant
environmental ministries and
conservation institutions.
Likewise, it is broadly recognized
in international instruments - like
the Convention to Combat
Desertification, the Ramsar
Convention on Wetlands, and the
Biodiversity Convention - that
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communities need to participate fully in
the management of their ecosystems, if such
management is to be equitable and
effective. This is particularly important
for women, who depend even more than men on
resources such as fuelwood, freshwater and
medicinal plants. Women are recognized as
very important biodiversity managers,
including in the Biodiversity Convention's
preamble.
It is for these reasons that more and
more governments and conservation
institutions are implementing policies and
projects that encourage community-based
management of ecosystems. As well as
handing over large tracts of land to
indigenous peoples, they are putting in
place various incentive structures to
strengthen community governance over
natural resources. They are also supporting
the need for more attention to be paid to
the role and needs of women in natural
resource management.
trade could undermine rights
However, there is a serious risk that
trade agreements promoted by the World
Trade Organization will undermine many of
these policies. For example, the European
Union is including “landscape and ecosystem
management services” as a sector to be
liberalized under the General Agreement on
Trade in Services (GATS, see page 8). The
EU has requested such liberalization from
numerous countries including Argentina ,
Australia , Brazil , China , India , Kenya
, the Philippines and South Africa . All of
these countries have important indigenous
populations, and many of them have specific
laws and policies to give indigenous and
other communities priority rights regarding
the management of forests and other
ecosystems.
However, if these countries accept the
EU's proposals, foreign companies and/or
conservation organizations could enter and
demand equal rights to access and manage
these natural resources. Giving priority
rights to indigenous peoples and local
communities would be classified as being
“discriminatory”towards foreign
“competitors” in the “ecosystem management
market”.
This may seem far-fetched, but
regretfully it isn't. This new trend
towards market-based conservation
mechanisms – such as eco-tourism, carbon
sinks and biodiversity offsets - has made
it more and more attractive for large
companies and profitoriented conservation
organizations to “invest” in the management
of protected areas and other precious
ecosystems. They may thus argue that they
have been “discriminated against” if the
management of a protected area is put in
the hands of a local community.
additional threats posed by nama and
trips
Other important threats to the rights of
indigenous peoples and local communities
are posed by negotiations on Non-
Agricultural Market Access (NAMA). For
example, export bans on raw logs, which
were put in place to address the almost
incurable problem of unsustainable and
often illegal logging in countries such as
Indonesia , would be made impossible if
current NAMA notifications were accepted.
It is also possible that regulations to
protect local communities and indigenous
peoples against the social and
environmental impacts of largescale mining
and logging could be challenged by
multinational companies as unjustified
barriers to trade and investment.
Add to that the devastation of
traditional knowledge caused by the WTO
Trade Related aspects of Intellectual
Property Rights agreement (TRIPS, see page
8) and the destruction of forests and other
ecosystems caused by large-scale soy
expansion and other monocultures promoted
by the Agreement on Agriculture (see page
7), and it is clear that indigenous
peoples, local communities, and the
ecosystems they have been managing for
generations have nothing to gain from the
so-called ‘Doha Development Agenda'.
