Why Indigenous peoples’ issues must be national issues

For the Indigenous communities living in Peru’s Amazon forests, achieving legal recognition that guarantees their collective rights to land is a clunky process that can take as long as 20 years to realize. What’s more, this can be a dangerous process. Peru is the fourth most dangerous place to be an ‘environmental defender,’ according to Global Witness, whose special report into the country was inspired when four Indigenous leaders were murdered after trying to ward illegal loggers off their land

Twenty-three years have passed since Peru’s ratification of the international Indigenous rights agreement, Convention 169, and 11 years have drifted since the signing of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). The international agreements have been signed, but Peru is struggling to promote and protect the land and natural resources rights of its traditional populations.

Since 1974, more than 1,300 Indigenous communities of the Peruvian Amazon have obtained communal titles for approximately 12 million hectares of land. Even with this important progress, which includes 17 percent of the country’s forests, titling remains fraught with logistical problems. It’s a long, complicated and costly process that not all communities can get through. The upshot of this is that the rights to millions of hectares of forested land are unprotected, and vulnerable to exploitation.

In the video above, the titling process is explored. “If the rights of Indigenous peoples are vulnerable, then Peru’s forests are also vulnerable,” explains Anne Larson, principal scientist at CIFOR.

During 2014 – 2018, Larson and a team of scientists and partners studied the implementation of collective tenure rights reforms in Peru as part of the Global Comparative Study on Forest Tenure Reform (GCS-Tenure), a research project that covered six countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Peru’s process was the most complex, had the least number of officials assigned to manage conflict resolution – whereby, for example, mining interests may conflict with local community interests- and had the highest number of conflicts.

The research highlights five key actions that would help Peru advance the recognition of Indigenous territories and pave a sustainable future for the country’s forests:

1. Build and demonstrate political will by putting the regularization of indigenous communities’ rights on the political agenda,
2. Simplify the current procedures, promote an integrated and consistent set of policies and processes and make a long-term commitment, including the resolution or transformation of conflicts,
3. Support subnational governments, which now handle a large part of the titling processes,
4. Assist Indigenous communities by providing technical assistance and support in developing their livelihoods, and ensure the condition of the forests is in line with their own vision, and
5. Recognize that the titling of communal lands is not enough on its own to guarantee control of the territory when there is pressure on strategic resources in the Amazon: there is more than just the titling to be done.

The inclusion of Indigenous, local community and women’s rights in the latest IPCC report proves that the Indigenous peoples of Peru do not own their issues alone; solving them is in Peru’s national interest, and international interest too.