UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues- Eighth Session May 19-29, 2009 Global Indigenous Women’s Caucus Statement

temous.org, mardi 26 mai 2009

Agenda Item 3 : Follow Up on the Recommendations of the Permanent Forum (a) Economic and Social Development

Honorable Chairwoman, Members of the UN Permanent Forum, and distinguished representatives of Indigenous Peoples, sisters and brothers here today,

Indigenous Women are the human embodiment of Mother Earth. Managing and protecting Earth’s nurturing gifts is our responsibility. Governments, market-based approaches, finance capital, multinational corporations and extractive industries continue to endanger life for the sake of profit. The recent global economic collapse, Climate Change, water and biodiversity depletion, wars, forced displacement, militarization, and violence against women, children, and Mother Earth provide clear and unmistakable evidence that this system does not work.

Indigenous cultures expressed through Indigenous Women’s work, lives and experiences are in peril. We re-affirm that Indigenous Women bring worldviews, deep invaluable knowledge and tools to correct the global crises—stemming directly from and caused by unsustainable economies—and to carry out their communities’ self-determining development. Furthermore, it is our basic human right to articulate our distinct views of our interconnected relationships with the world around us, including all of our relations, human and non-human. Indigenous Women, as the culture bearers and progenitors of future generations of our Peoples, possess great responsibility in the transmission of this knowledge to our children.

We reiterate our fundamental role in seed conservation, food production, and preservation. Indigenous Women, as the keepers and guardians of much of the world’s biodiversity, including many food and medicinal plants are alarmed by the ongoing expropriations by seed and pharmaceutical corporations—with governments’ complicity—to patent the seeds, genetic material, and/or the processes used in the genetic manipulation of the plants.

Indigenous Women are deeply concerned that the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) have not recognized Indigenous Peoples’ rights to our traditional territories, lands and waters in the negotiations of an international regime of access and benefit-sharing due for completion by 2010. We are concerned when the Parties assert their national sovereignty over both genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge necessary to our collective well-being and has cultural value. Indigenous Women oppose all forms of patenting of any form of life. We consider genetic modification and the potential contamination of land by genetically engineered technology a continuation of genocide upon Indigenous Peoples. We perceive these as both malicious and disrespectful acts towards our Mother Earth, ancestries, cultures and future generations.

With regard to the reports of the Permanent Forum on social and economic development, on women, as well as the report on extractive industries, the Global Indigenous Women’s Caucus has the following recommendations :

FOOD SOVEREIGNTY

1. We recommend that all UN bodies and agencies and governments report on the implementation of Articles 26 and 31 of the UN DRIP related to the protection of Indigenous Peoples’ rights to their lands and territories ; and Indigenous Peoples’ rights to own, control, utilize and protect all aspects of their cultural heritage, including genetic resources. This includes associated traditional knowledge and trade practices derived from their lands and territories.

2. We ask that the Permanent Forum endorse the Declaration of Atitlán (Atitlán, Sololá, Guatemala, April 17-19, 2002), which states, in part, “Food Sovereignty is the right of Peoples to define their own policies and strategies for the sustainable production, distribution, and consumption of food, with respect for their own cultures and their own systems of managing natural resources.” Therefore, we recommend that the Permanent Forum request the appropriate UN agencies to carryout their human rights obligations to guarantee Indigenous Peoples’ right to food sovereignty.

3. We recommend that UN fora addressing issues impacting Indigenous Peoples’ right to food sovereignty, such as the FAO, IFAD and the CBD, report on their processes to protect Indigenous Peoples’ rights to hunt, gather, fish, and carry out their agricultural and other traditional livelihood activities. We call on the agencies to promote capacity-building, and programs and projects by and for Indigenous Women, which focus on the recovery and revitalization of food traditions, sustainable agriculture, and seed saving and free sharing among ourselves. These programs and projects should ensure the full participation of Indigenous Women.

4. We recommend that the Permanent Forum request that the Parties to the CBD recognize Indigenous Peoples’ rights to our ancestral lands, territories and waters, including our genetic resources and associated Indigenous knowledge. Further, we recommend that the Permanent Forum request the Parties to recognize this ownership and right to protect and control our genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge, and Indigenous Peoples’ rights to free, prior and informed consent (FPIC), in the operational text of the proposed international regime on Access and Benefit Sharing. We request further action from the OHCHR Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to examine the human rights implications of the current discourse on ownership of genetic resources and make recommendations to protect the rights of Indigenous Peoples.

5. We urge the Permanent Forum to demand full and effective participation of the Indigenous Women in any and all UN for a affecting our rights, providing translators at all times and especially during international meetings so that participants can make recommendations based on a full understanding of each other’s concerns.

6. We recommend that the Permanent Forum request the appropriate UN bodies and agencies to guarantee that Indigenous Peoples’ right to food sovereignty and that food security is not negatively affected by biotechnology, in particular genetically-modified organisms, genetically-modified crops, or any environmental release of genetic use restriction technologies (GURTs), commonly referred to as “terminator technology.”

EXTRACTIVE INDUSTRIES

7. We support the Anchorage Declaration (Anchorage, Alaska, USA, April 24, 2009) call for phasing out fossil fuel development and a moratorium on new fossil fuel development on or near Indigenous lands and territories. Furthermore, we support the Permanent Forum’s conclusion that Indigenous Peoples have “the right to say no to extraction or exploration.” We also support the call for a process that works toward the eventual phase out of fossil fuels, without infringing on Indigenous Peoples’ right to development.

8. We also call upon the Permanent Forum to strengthen interaction with the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises ; and to facilitate negotiating platforms with affected Indigenous Peoples, particularly in regard to extractive industries and their impacts on our ways of live, cultures and on our Mother Earth.

9. We call on the Permanent Forum to cooperate with the Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of Indigenous Peoples to carry out a broad-based, global study on the activities of extractive industries that damage Indigenous Peoples, especially Indigenous Women, and their impacts in the context of the legal frameworks under which they operate.

10. We recommend a creation of an inter-regional commission of Indigenous Peoples to review the activities of the major extractive industries and to report to the UN Universal Periodic Review (UPR) for each state review.

11. We recommend the UNPFII to nominate a Special Rapporteur to prepare a report on the impact of the activities of major extractive corporations on the health of Indigenous Women.

CULTURAL RESOURCES

12. We call upon all relevant UN bodies and agencies to end the mining and marketing of water and to recognize free access to water as a basic human right in order to preserve cultural heritage, ways of life and self-development.

13. Indigenous Peoples have the right to be properly informed in our indigenous languages and to have meaningful pre-decisional consultation in any development projects. Indigenous Peoples, including Indigenous Women, have the right to appoint their own experts to survey, to evaluate, and to determine if projects impacting on our lives and cultural resources can proceed. Indigenous Women must have equal participation and authority in this process. Indigenous experts’ knowledge, findings and recommendations have parity with those of others and must be given priority. The free, prior and informed consent of Indigenous Peoples, including Indigenous Women, must be obtained before such projects can proceed, especially in the case of mega-projects.

14. We request an investigation by January 1, 2010, free from conflict of interest, focusing on the negative impacts and effects of water appropriation by multinational corporations from indigenous communities ; specifically the deterioration, depletion, lack of access and contamination of water.

15. We recommend that UNESCO should take an active role in ensuring that access to sacred sites, genesis sites, and traditional cultural places be protected, and that privatization of land does not negate the right of Indigenous Women’s and their families’ free access to these sites to practice their spirituality, religion, and cultural ways of life for social and economic development.

16. We recommend that the Permanent Forum support the preparation of procedural access to the International Court of Justice on the question of projects impacting our lives, tangible and intangible cultural heritage and resources of Indigenous Peoples, and Mother Earth. This would entail the enforcement of treaties, agreements, and other constructive arrangements between Indigenous Peoples and states.

17. We recommend that the Permanent Forum monitor with UNESCO and other cultural bodies and agencies at the international levels the implementation of Indigenous Women’s rights to equal, full and effective participation and authority in all development processes that impact Indigenous Peoples, especially Indigenous Women.

ENVIRONMENT

18. We strongly support and endorse the Anchorage Declaration (Anchorage, Alaska, USA, April 24, 2009), which especially calls for action in paragraphs 6 and 13.

a. Paragraph 6 : “We challenge states to abandon false solutions to climate change which negatively impact Indigenous Peoples rights, land, air, ocean, forests territories, and waters, including by not limited to nuclear energy, large scale dams, geo-engineering techniques, ‘clean coal’, ago fuels, plantations, market based mechanisms such as carbon trading, the clean development mechanism and forest offsets [REDD]. The human rights of Indigenous Peoples to protect our forests and forests livelihood must be recognized, respected and ensured.”

b. Paragraph 13 : “In order to provide the resources necessary for our collective survival in response to the climate crisis, we declare our communities waters, air, forests, oceans, sea, ice, traditional lands, and territories to be ; ‘food sovereignty areas’, defined and directed by Indigenous Peoples according to customary laws, free from extractive industries, de-foresting, chemical-bases industrial food productions systems.” As such,

19. We strongly recommend the full and effective participation of Indigenous Peoples, especially Indigenous Women in the planning and implementation of all strategies and agreements related to Climate Change. The conference of the parties of the UNFCCC in Copenhagen must include the full and effective participation of the Indigenous Peoples, especially participation from Indigenous Women and Youth.

20. We recommend access to the International Court of Justice to raise our concerns, and to provide a space for Indigenous Women to denounce the abuse of the Indigenous Peoples’ land, water and forest.

EDUCATION

21. We ask the Permanent Forum to encourage UN bodies and agencies as well as governments to take action in order to establish policies that promote and foster the access to, development and maintenance of indigenous-centered education systems and culturally relevant curricula with the full engagement of Indigenous educators and culture bearers, paying particular attention to the education needs of women and girls, allowing them the achievement of education at all levels.

22. Pertaining to UN Millennium Development Goal #2 - Achieving Universal Primary Education, we highlight the need to take a rights-based approach to form true partnerships in the implementation and monitoring of strategies to ensure effective achievement of this Millennium Development Goal (MDG).

23. We support the Permanent Forum’s invitation to UNESCO and governments’ support for a world conference on linguistic diversity, Indigenous languages, identity and education. Furthermore, we welcome the PFII Report of the International Expert Group Meeting on Indigenous Languages and support its recommendations 40 (g) (h) (i) (j) and (k) to governments and ask for follow up on these in 2010.

24. We ask the Permanent Forum to urge the governments to allocate the necessary funding to support our work to revitalize our Indigenous languages. This includes developing culturally appropriate pedagogic materials and curriculum, planning, and training and certification of teachers to teach our languages from our own culturally-specific methodologies and perspectives.

25. We ask the Permanent Forum to urge Indigenous Peoples to use and speak our languages freely all the time. In this regard, Indigenous language learning nests and Indigenous schools and universities should be supported to build a bridge between school, family and community to keep our languages alive and vital.

HEALTH

26. We urge the Permanent Forum to request the UN bodies and agencies and governments to take actions to guarantee Indigenous Women’s full and uninhibited access to state health programs. Indigenous Women must also be enabled to have unrestricted and free access to their own traditional health systems and to develop health policies in full consultation indigenous and other health experts.

27. We urge the Permanent Forum to ask UN bodies and agencies and governments that traditional and Indigenous healing systems must be respected as full and complete knowledge systems in their own right. Practitioners and teachers in these systems must be accorded the equivalent status of experts as other non-traditional or western medical and healing systems.

28. We ask the Permanent Forum to request governments to guarantee Indigenous Women full access to their traditional medicines by implementing the rights to lands, territories, and natural resources established in the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Thank you.

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Technological alternatives

Michel Bauwens points to the importance of the possibilities for co-operative, peer-to-peer production opened up by new technologies

Michel Bauwens, Red Pepper, January 2009

As economic and social systems transform themselves into distributed networks through the technical possibilities opened up in recent decades, a new ‘peer-to-peer’ (P2P) dynamic is emerging. Best known as the means to share music files on the internet, P2P is actually a far broader social logic underpinning how people come together to create and exchange common value on a global scale – giving rise to new modes of production, governance and property. In many ways, it complements and extends upon existing forms of co-operative and solidarity economy.

How P2P works

P2P is based on free engagement, and hence represents non-alienated ‘work’, driven by personal interests and passion. Once a community establishes itself and gains sufficient traction, there are good reasons to believe that it becomes ‘hyperproductive’. Subjectively, because intrinsic and positive motivations are clearly preferable to extrinsic and negative motivations. Objectively, because the characteristics of such ways of working – equal participation, communal validation processes, distribution of tasks instead of division of labour, ad hoc meritocratic leadership, active engagement of users and a large base of contributors – are very hard to match by any for-profit competitor.

Such a community also needs an infrastructure of cooperation, so we usually get hybrid modes, where the self-managed community is coupled with a non-profit foundation that manages its infrastructure, as well as businesses operating on the basis of the wealth of the commons in the marketplace. Through the practice of benefit-sharing, these businesses support the common infrastructure, which in turn strengthens the community.

Once a for-profit business, relying on proprietary formats, faces such competition, it can pretty much close its doors.

Empirical examples are Microsoft’s Internet Explorer vs the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox, and the proprietary Britannica vs the open Wikipedia. The p2pfoundation wiki has hundreds of other case studies, compiled by a global independent research community.

Hardware is harder

That dynamic is by no means limited to the production of immaterial goods, such as open content and free software, but is now rapidly moving to open and shared designs – what is often called ‘open hardware’. The reason is simple: anything that needs to be physically produced needs to be intellectually designed. Readers may want to look at http://p2pfoundation.net/Product_Hacking for a list of nearly 150 ‘open hardware’ projects, with a sizable number having already reached maturation.

But here comes the obstacle: whereas peer production of immaterial goods needs the free individual aggregation of immaterial means of production – brains, computers and access to socialised networks – physical production also needs cost-recovery methods.

This limit suggests that more fundamental change still requires fundamental changes in political and social power, so that peer production can be matched with cooperative production in the physical sphere. The alternative, which I think is likely in a transitional period, is ‘built-only capitalism’, driven by a sector of capitalists who, instead of relying on intellectual property, decide to ‘enable and empower participation’ – and profit from it.

Thus a new frontier of social cooperation and conflict is created, between proprietary platform owners and user communities (the sharing model); and between productive communities and the surrounding business ecologies (the commons model). The sharing model is based on the need and desire of individuals to share their creative production, the commons model is based on the creation of common artifacts. Both models have different logics, social structures, and underlying social contracts.

I think that social change will also emerge from a new structure of desire in contemporary youth. Once you have tasted ‘non-alienated’ voluntary participation in an online productive community, you are strongly motivated to extend it to the whole of life, and this drives the emergence of a powerful global movement that embraces three new paradigms of social organisation: open and free availability of ‘raw material’ for cooperation; participative modes of production impacting the design of techno-social cooperation; and commons-oriented output, available to all. The combination of these three principles creates a ‘circulation of the commons’ that ensures the social reproduction of P2P.

Value crisis

Under what conditions can this be facilitated? First of all, we have to understand that what happened with the computer and the networks – the ‘miniaturisation of the means of immaterial production’ – is going to happen, and in fact already is happening, in the sphere of the means of material production. The possibility arises of a combination of a new cooperative and relocalised economy, coupled with global and interconnected open design communities. If we can re-invent property modes away from the current monopolisation of financial property, such trends will be speeded up enormously.

It is important to understand that peer production creates a value crisis, a crisis of accumulation if you want, for the capitalist economy, of which both owners and producers are the victim. The reason is that more and more of the essential innovation becomes social, a result of the emergent networks of distributed collaboration in open communities. We have created the ability for an exponential growth in the direct creation of use value (think of the hundred million of downloaded videos via YouTube, a quantum leap in social production compared to the mass media model), but only a linear growth of monetisation. Google may be a giant, but only a fraction of websites can live from online advertising. So, while Linux creates a $40 billion economy, at the same time it destroys $65 billion annually in the proprietary software business. But undermining old business models in this way also creates precarity among the workers.

The short-term solution is organised benefit-sharing between productive communities, the non-profit foundations managing the infrastructure, and the businesses profiting from the commons. It works well for Linux, but is only reactive. Yet 75 per cent of Linux programmers are now paid, and recently, while I attended a free software congress in Ecuador, I was told that zero per cent of free software programmers in that continent are unemployed.

Ultimately, these ad hoc evolutions are not sufficient, and as countries and regions recognise that their ‘competitivity’ largely depends on such open innovation, they may start thinking in terms of basic income. The advantage of it, as recognition of the value each citizen creates for society through their natural participation in such networks, is that it creates a basis for workers to have some autonomy from the market. Such a basic income would not only benefit immaterial peer production, but also the experimentation with social and cooperative means of material production.

A partner state

We need a fundamental re-orientation of public policy, around the notion of a ‘partner state’, which enables and empowers direct social value creation.

I have proposed a set of three institutions to promote commons-based peer production: An institute for the creation and protection of the commons, which promotes and sustains the creation of new modes of value creation; an institute for open business, which promotes models of social entrepreneurship so that each commons can create an ecology of enterprises; and an institute for benefit-sharing and commons recognition, which focuses on patronage and various forms of support that do not destroy the P2P logic of voluntary contributions. It creates prizes, awards and bounties to support individuals involved in commons-based value-creation.

A partner state approach, combined with a strengthening of peer property formats, and new forms of capital ownership combined with mutual credit and non-capitalist money, would go a very long way in stimulating the autonomous sphere of production. Growing the counter-economy and a social life based on a new logic is not something to start after we gain political power, but right now.

At this stage we do not have a magic bullet solution in response to the disintegration of the neoliberal system. We should continue to furiously build the counter-society within the old. The emergence of open/free, participatory and commons-oriented movements, which has occurred in all fields but started around ‘immaterial’ cooperation, is now ready to be matched by their counterparts in the ‘physical world’. So I expect to see a speeding-up of real world alternatives in many different fields: more localisation efforts such as Transition Towns, more use of alternative currencies and mutual credit, and the rapid growth of global open design efforts with local partners in the field of real production.

One scenario is that the ‘enlightened part’ of the establishment, those with a long term vision who know the endgame is near, will push through a new global compact based on green capitalism, which simply cannot function without greater participation in social and political design. Compare it to the 18th century, which saw the downward trend of the nobles and the rise of the bourgeoisie, reaching a temporary point of equilibrium. Green capitalism would allow such a scenario, leading to a new surge of technological and social innovation. But if you believe, as I do, that capitalism as infinite growth is fundamentally unsustainable, this will then set the stage for a new transition phase, with P2P becoming the core social logic, with markets becoming subsystems for particular goods.

P2P as an alternative to capitalism

P2P involves the production of use-value through the free cooperation of producers who have access to distributed capital (essentially computers) different from for-profit or public production by state-owned enterprises. Its product is not exchange value for a market, but use-value for a community of users (for example in the sharing of film and music). It is governed by the community of producers (and users) themselves, and not by market allocation or corporate hierarchy. And it involves common property regimes by which the use of the service or product is freely accessible on a universal basis, through new common property regimes, different from private property or public (state) property.

There is a fundamental difference between the capitalist market and distributed P2P dynamics, which is exactly the reason it needs to replace market fundamentalism. A market is like the swarm of insects, and lacks intentionality. Participants only seek their own advantage, and the system cannot take into account any externalities, so the system destroys the biosphere and has a very high social cost. P2P dynamics are quite different: it’s a goal or object-oriented sociality, which unites people around the common object, which is almost generally the construction of a public or common good. Therefore externalities are built into the very fabric of P2P dynamics.

Michel Bauwens is the director of the Peer to Peer Foundation – this article is based on an interview with Red Pepper. You can read Bauwens’ ‘Political Economy of Peer Production’ at www.ctheory.net

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