IP international conference:
Empowered IP villages protect environment vs. climate crisis

BAGUIO CITY, Philippines (Nov. 8, 2010) -- Ibon International findings reports that “Climate change is a matter of social justice. Two centuries of increasing Green House Gas (GHG) emissions coincide with: colonial and neocolonial subordination of the Southern people and resources for Northern and elite benefit.

Climate change and the larger ecological crisis caused by the dominant economic model wherein there is unequal access, control and use of the planet's common resources – including the atmosphere; and
Global North and their corporations expropriated and abused common planetary resources, often through colonial means, to achieve excessive levels of profit, wealth and consumption.”

In the ongoing International Conference on Indigenous Peoples Rights, Alternatives, and Solutions to Climate Crisis, indigenous peoples representatives from some __ countries have reached an unspoken consensus that majority programs sponsored by the states are not answering the crisis but instead it is making it worst.

“Most state sponsored programs to arrest the climate crisis take off from a capitalist dimension,” said Windel Bolinget, CPA chairman.
Large extractive industries like logging, mining and corporate agriculture and forestry have depleted much of the natural resources of the world that has, as a consequence, notoriously increased the GHG emissions and effects.

Indigenous peoples all over the world have, in different ways against all odds asserted their rights over their ancestral lands against corporate plunder so that, according to the CPA, capitalist corporations have turned their focus to indigenous peoples territories as new resources for profit.
In this conference's workshop on community-based adaptation and mitigation, participants shared their communities' experience in the preservation and protection of their natural resources.

Participants from the Chitaggong Hill Tracts, told of their villages Mouza Forest, the source of wild fruits, rattan, firewood, etc. It is the watershed for their springs, river and irrigation. Its protection and maintenance is a collective responsibility under the supervision of the village elders and no one can enter without the clear permission of the village elders.

Participants from the areas said that it was not very different from the Muyong of Ifugao or Lapat system of Abra and Tagal of Malaysia or that of the Australian aborigines.

The participants in the workshop noted that the practice and respect for this village system in the protection of their forest and watershed still exist today because the communities were united and asserted the protection of their environment.

But, in the same breath the participants qualified that corporations in cooperation with government look at most of these indigenous peoples areas as new frontiers for logging, mining and other extractive industries and even have militarized some.

In conclusion, the workshop participants have resolved to strengthen the campaign for empowering indigenous peoples communities in order to assure the protection of ancestral land, resources and our traditional knowledge and practices.#