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Tebtebba’s Philippine Program Launches its Website Subpage

Tebtebba’s Philippine Program Launches its Website Subpage

“We walk the talk of our advocacy work,” stressed Florence Daguitan, Coordinator of Tebtebba’s Philippine Program during the launching of the said desk’s subpage under the organization’s official website. Participants from the different indigenous community and organization partners of Tebtebba joined in the said online event.

“…Diay inrugin ti Tebtebba nga systems of rice intensification (SRI) ditoy Guesang, maysa nga sitio ti Bangaan, talaga nga ongoing, ipa-practice da piman. Tatta, makitkita nga adda progress na diay sitio ta ada en diay processing da ti squash canton, peanut brittle ken banana chips. Adu en ti suporta nga it-ited ti gobyerno ngem ti kitkitaen tayo ket diay nangrugi ket datayo nga Pidlisan Tribe Organization (PITO) ken Tebtebba (One of the projects that Tebtebba started is the SRI in Guesang, a sitio [a territorial portion that is part of the barangay] of Bangaan, which is ongoing and is being practiced. At present, we see an improvement in the sitio because they already have a processing center for squash canton, peanut brittle and banana chips. The sitio is now receiving support from the government, as well, thanks to the initiative of PITO and Tebtebba),” shared Osenio Lay-os, a Pidlisan elder, as he provided updates on the capacity-building initiatives done by their community through the facilitation of Tebtebba. 

The Philippine Program is an initiative within Tebtebba that directly deals with community strengthening and operationalizing of the Indigenous Peoples' Sustainable Self-Determined Development framework in its pilot areas in the Philippines with the support of several funders including the Pawanka Fund and SwedBio.

Visit Tebtebba’s Philippine Program’s subpage at philippine.tebtebba.org.

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Indigenous Peoples Join the IPSSDD Training in Bangkok

Indigenous Peoples Join the IPSSDD Training in Bangkok

"The air, the birds, the trees, the water, the people... we are all connected to each other," 

Indigenous peoples stressed on how their traditional knowledge and practices are deeply tied with the changing of the seasons and the availability of natural resources, emphasizing on the need to sustain high biodiversity and combat increasing climate change during the Training on Indigenous Peoples Sustainable and Self-Determined Development with Tebtebba, Maleya Foundation and the Eastern Himalaya Network on Climate Change in Bangkok, Thailand on 29 July to 1 August 2022, done with support from Brot fur die Welt. 

 

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Biodiversity Crisis Affects Billions Who Rely on Wild Species, Researchers Say

Biodiversity Crisis Affects Billions Who Rely on Wild Species, Researchers Say

The latest global assessment of the decline in plant and animal life found some bright spots but recommended significant changes to hunting and other practices to address the risks.

Billions of people worldwide rely on some 50,000 wild species for food, energy, medicine and income, according to a sweeping new scientific report that concluded humans must make dramatic changes to hunting and other practices to address an accelerating biodiversity crisis.

The report, prepared for the United Nations over four years by 85 experts from 33 countries, is the most comprehensive look yet at the pathways for using wild species sustainably, or in ways that do not lead to the long-term decline of those resources and ensures their availability for future generations. It draws upon thousands of scientific studies and other references, including a body of Indigenous and local knowledge. Indigenous and poor communities are among the most immediately affected by overuse of wild species, the report said.

“Half of humanity benefits from and makes use of wild species, and often without even knowing that they’re doing so,” said Marla R. Emery, one of the co-chairs of the assessment, which was conducted by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. A summary was approved Thursday in Bonn, Germany, by representatives from 139 countries, including the United States, with the full report set for publication in a few months.

The new assessment builds on an exhaustive 2019 report from the same group that concluded that humans had altered the natural world so drastically that one million plant and animal species were at risk of extinction. A year later, another United Nations report declared that nations had made little progress on international commitments, made in 2010, to tackle catastrophic biodiversity collapse.

Yet the focus of this latest assessment was to provide a more optimistic outlook on how wild species can be sustainably used by people around the world, said Jean-Marc Fromentin, also one of the co-chairs.

One-third of the wild species that humans use in some way, and which also appear on the “red list” — those listed as threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature — experienced stable or increasing population trends despite human use, according to one study cited in the report. This suggests that “the use of these specific species is not yet directly contributing to their extinction, as far as we can tell,” said Sophie Marsh, a biodiversity master’s student at the University College London and lead author of the study on threatened species, which was published in 2021.

Indigenous and local knowledge is crucial to learning some of the best practices for sustainable use, the report said, but traditionally it has been underused. Indigenous communities have long incorporated sustainable uses of wild species in their cultural practices, and an estimated 15 percent of global forests are managed as “community resources,” the report said, by Indigenous peoples and local communities.

The report was referring to practices like those used in the hills of the Cordillera region of Luzon, the largest island in the Philippines. There, “the entire community mobilizes to protect the forest,” said Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, an Indigenous rights activist who grew up in the region. The practice is called Batangan, a resource management system that involves a shared sense of responsibility for monitoring the diversity of the forests and planting new trees as the older ones age.

It’s not just about the trees, “it’s about the water, the plants and the animals, the microorganisms,” and increasingly, it’s about climate change as forests play a critical role in sequestering carbon, Ms. Tauli-Corpuz said.

The sustainable use of wild species is central to the identity and existence of many Indigenous and local communities, the report said.

“If wildlife disappears, our culture is at risk, our lifestyle and our livelihood is at risk,” said Viviana Figueroa, an Argentine Indigenous lawyer and activist who participated in dialogues with the report authors as a part of her involvement with the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity. “There is still a lot of work to be done, but at least there is some recognition,” Ms. Figueroa said.

Future policies governing the use of wild species will need to take into account the social and historical dimensions of sustainability, and whether the benefits from that use are distributed fairly. For example, vicuña fibers, found in luxury garments, are highly priced and produced by mostly low-income Indigenous communities in South America that contribute to vicuña conservation by allowing the animals to graze on their communal or private land.

Yet, it is “almost impossible” for a remote Andean community to negotiate with an international textile company or to place their product on the international market, the report said, meaning that most of the profits from the trade in vicuña fibers are captured by traders and textile companies.

The fishing industry will need to reduce unregulated and illegal fishing, support more small-scale fisheries and suppress harmful subsidies that encourage overfishing, the report recommended. The logging industry will also need to invest in technology that reduces waste in the manufacturing of wood products, according to the report’s conclusions, and governments may need to increase bans or regulations on wild meat in some regions, at the same time assessing whether those policies might affect food insecurity in those areas.

The findings from the new report may soon have a direct effect on international policy. The report was in part conducted at the request of Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, a treaty meant to ensure that the global trade in plants and animals does not imperil their survival in the wild. The parties to the treaty will use the findings from the assessment to inform their decisions surrounding trade at their conference in Panama in November.

The overexploitation of wild species isn’t the only factor driving the decline; human-caused climate change is also a major force, the report said. Growing human populations and consumption, along with technological advances that make many extractive practices more efficient, will also put greater pressures on wild species.

“We have to make sure these policy instruments benefit everybody,” said Emma Archer, a professor at the University of Pretoria in South Africa and one of the assessment’s lead authors. “There doesn’t have to be both winners and losers.”

Read article on The New York Times website

Preparing bamboo fences for the sulagad central nursery.

Lambangian People Assess Their Sulagad System Revival Project

Statement on Agenda Item 7: International Decade of Indigenous Languages

Statement on Agenda Item 7: International Decade of Indigenous Languages

EMRIP 15TH Session

UN Geneva

5 July 2022

 

Agenda Item 7: International Decade of Indigenous Languages

Presented by Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, Tebtebba (Indigenous Peoples’ International Centre for Policy Research and Education)

 

Madame Chair,

This Agenda Item on Indigenous Languages is very important and I would like to use this opportunity to speak of activities we in Tebtebba have undertaken to promote the goals of the Indigenous Decade and to share our future plans as well.

To recall, the Global Plan of Action of the Indigenous Decade have stated the following which I will quote.

“The right of free unimpeded choice of language use, expression, and opinion as well as self-determination and active engagement in public life without fear of discrimination is a prerequisite for inclusiveness and equality as key conditions for the creation of open and participatory societies.

Beyond the foundational contribution of languages to the preservations of biological diversity, many of the world’s languages are geographically located within the planet’s hotspots of biodiversity. Indigenous traditional knowledge of the environment represents a key resource for developing innovative solutions to combating hunger, climate change and protecting biodiversity. The protection of traditional knowledge systems is built into the fabric of Indigenous languages.

The International Decade of Indigenous Languages offers us a unique opportunity to collaborate in policy development, to ensure continuity and coherence of actions and stimulate an intercultural dialogue in the true spirit of multi-stakeholder engagement, to contribute to making human rights a reality, and to take necessary measures in an interdisciplinary manner to support and strengthen Indigenous languages around the world. “

Tebtebba, my organization, has taken seriously the right of indigenous peoples to their cultures, traditional knowledge and languages and thus we warmly welcome the adoption of the Decade and the Global Plan of Action. We have collaborated with various universities in the Philippines and linguists who want to contribute in revitalizing and promoting the indigenous languages in the Philippines which are more than 100. I am a fluent speaker of my own indigenous language, Kankanaey-Igorot and I am fully aware of what the threats are to losing a language. Many indigenous languages in the Philippines are at risk, especially those spoken by smaller indigenous populations. The main reason for this is the continuing discrimination against indigenous children who still speak their mother tongue amidst the efforts of the Department of Education to promote the dominant languages.

One major step needed is to encourage our indigenous peoples to continue to assert their right to speak their own languages. We asked that the Department of Education encourage the use of indigenous languages as the medium of instruction in places where they are the majority but then we realized that there are no orthographies (the study of correct spelling according to established  usage), dictionaries and materials on any of the indigenous languages . Furthermore , there are no trained teachers who can also use and teach the language. These led us to work with linguists and brought them to the communities we work with to learn more about the languages of indigenous peoples and help develop teaching materials on these languages. We did this with the Mandaya and Erumanen Menuvu in Mindanao. The elders taught them how they speak their languages and what these mean and it was the first time most of these academics had this experience. We also worked with some personnel of the Department of Education. Our hope is that the Department of Education will publish the results of these efforts and train teachers who can teach and use the languages. However, there is a long way to go, as the budgets they have won’t cover the expenses which will be entailed. Thus, we planned to hold a national conference on indigenous languages before the year ends.

A UNESCO report states that out of the 7,000 languages in the world today, 6,700 are indigenous peoples’ languages. According to the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, 40 percent of these indigenous languages are at risk of disappearing. This has prodded the Forum and other indigenous peoples’ mechanisms, as well as indigenous peoples themselves, to push for the adoption of the International Year of Indigenous Languages in 2019 and the subsequent push for the International Decade (2022-2032). The Global Plan of Action contains the  recommendations on how to ensure that indigenous languages are revitalized, protected and maintained. There is no doubt that the IYIL has achieved some successes but these need to be further expanded and consolidated by the implementation of the Global Plan. It is my hope that EMRIP keeps the theme of indigenous languages in its sessions during the Decade.

We, in Tebtebba, will be doing our role in implementing the Global Plan of Action in the 13 countries we work in Asia, Africa and Latin America under a partnership we call ELATIA (Maasai word for neighbourhood). The impact identified by the Global Plan is that “ Indigenous languages are preserved, revitalized, promoted and used across all socio-cultural, economic, environmental, and political domains and are drivers for building peace, justice, development and reconciliation in our societies”. We will contribute in achieving the 4 outcomes, 10 Outputs and corresponding activities contained in the Global Plan. However, we also want to stress that the States and the multilateral bodies, such as UNESCO, among others need to comply with their commitments contained in the plan. The contributions of these actors will be monitored by us and other indigenous organizations through our Community-based Monitoring and Information Systems (CBMIS) and the Indigenous Navigator.

Thank you for this opportunity to share Tebtebba’s views and activities and we look forward to a higher level of partnership with the governments and the multilateral bodies as well as with donors.

 

 

 

 

 

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