Niko Kyriakou

UNITED NATIONS, May 20 2005 (IPS) — Indigenous people at global talks here through the end of next week are urging international development and financial institutions to redirect funding to poverty reduction strategies that protect their rights to land, resources, and traditional culture.

The United Nations and World Bank define extreme poverty as subsistence on one dollar or less per day and their poverty reduction programmes tend to focus on raising peoples incomes.

But for indigenous people who grow or make most of what they need, poverty has less to do with money than with a loss of traditional lifestyles, said Victoria Corpuz, newly elected chair of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.

”When we talk about extreme poverty and hunger for indigenous peoples, this is almost synonymous to talking about their increasing alienation from their territories and resources, and their diminished capacity to continue producing their traditional foods and engage in traditional livelihoods,” Corpuz said at the forum’s fourth session, which opened last Monday and runs through Friday May 27.

The permanent forum is a body of 16 representatives, half of them nominated by indigenous organisations and half by U.N. member states. It meets annually to examine indigenous issues and reports its recommendations to the U.N. Economic and Social Council with the aim of better integrating indigenous issues with U.N. activities.

”Mainstream development has been one of the root causes of indigenous poverty,” Corpuz said in a paper. She said the culprits included not only industrial-scale resource extraction and large construction projects, but also chemical-intensive agriculture, forest plantations, and even the designation of environmentally protected areas.

Alienation from lands and resources leads to the breakdown of traditional networks in which indigenous people share resources and ultimately this increases the poverty of indigenous people, Corpuz said.

She suggested this cycle could be stopped by getting indigenous people involved in the design of development programmes that affect them, and by separating indigenous people out of the general population in statistics.

”The urgency for data disaggregation based on ethnicity has been one of the main recommendations of all the sessions of the permanent forum,” she said.

In U.N. Millennium Development Goal reports, indigenous peoples usually are ”hidden under general national averages which do not reflect the differentiated realities of specific groups,” she added.

Most of the world’s 370 million indigenous peoples, both in rich and poor countries, live in poverty, according to the forum.

A recent study by the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) found that 87 percent of indigenous people in Guatemala live in poverty compared to 54 percent of those not indigenous; 80 percent of indigenous peoples in Mexico live in poverty compared to only 18 percent of those not indigenous; 70 per cent versus 50 per cent in Peru; and in Bolivia, 64 percent versus 48 percent.

The United Nations plans to pump billions of dollars from donors into its first Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving the world’s extreme hunger and poverty by 2012.

Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Millennium Project, told the forum that the United Nations was eager to increase indigenous peoples’ input into the design of programmes aimed at meeting the MDG goals. Specific programmes, he added, were designed for specific geographical regions.

”The idea is to tailor investments to the specific needs of communities,” he said.

Sachs said that under the U.N.-linked, Millennium Villages initiative, specific regions can run village tests to see which strategies best help communities meet their basic needs in an environmentally sustainable way before implementing wide-reaching programmes.

MDG poverty reduction programmes would not fail where the World Bank’s poverty reduction model has failed, he added.

The bank’s Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), which countries must draft in order to receive aid, not only fail to involve indigenous people in their design but lack ”boldness” and ”adequate financing”, Sachs said.

The bank, however, said that it, too, is taking pains to better address indigenous needs.

The global development lender has taken steps to ”ensure that the development process fosters full respect for the dignity, rights, and uniqueness of the indigenous peoples,” said Navin Rai, an indigenous peoples coordinator for the bank.

On May 10, the bank’s board of executive directors endorsed a new agency policy on indigenous peoples, Rai said, adding that ”the new policy reflects an increased awareness of the need to promote indigenous peoples’ participation in development-related activities and to protect indigenous peoples’ rights to their lands, resources, identities and culture.”

From now, he added, the bank will only finance projects that have included ”free, prior, and informed consultation” and which have ”broad community support by the affected indigenous peoples.”

The Bank currently finances 237 projects involving indigenous peoples and expects to finance 97 more by fiscal year 2008, Rai added.

U.N. Deputy Secretary General Louise Frechette told forum delegates that international law also could play a role in protecting the rights of indigenous people.

”At the level of international law, member states have still not adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People,” she said.

The Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention of 1989 also supports the rights of indigenous people to enjoy a full measure of human rights and fundamental freedoms without discrimination. Only 17 countries have ratified the convention so far.