ICCA Consortium's First Ever Newsletter

The Indigenous Peoples' and Community Conserved Areas (ICCA) Consortium just released its first ever newsletter. The newsletter includes a brief description of the ICCA Consortium and then details recent activities and events the Consortium has lead or participated in. Please do read through to hear about the great work that the Consortium is doing around the world. 

Within are updates from Regional Coordinators on activities in Panama, Canada, Chile, Senegal, Niger and Burkina Faso. Additionally, there are summaries of the Consortium's Fourth Annual General Assembly and the planning retreat, both held in Indonesia. There are also reports from meetings and events in Nepal, Switzerland, South Africa, Taiwan, Indonesia and Italy. 

The newsletter can be downloaded here. Follow the ICCA Consortium on Twitter here and/or like them on Facebook here. 

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Natural Justice advises Namibian Government on draft ABS Legislation

On the 23rd and 24th of February, Kabir Bavikatte and Gino Cocchiaro are in Windhoek, Namibia to attend the Awareness Raising Workshop on Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS) for Sustainable Utilization of Cultural and Natural Assets in Namibia. 

Namibia currently does not have ABS legislation and the workshop, attended by the Minister of Environment and Tourism, Namibian Members of Parliament, Traditional Authority representatives and other representatives of Indigenous peoples and local communities, aims to inform key decision makers in Namibia about the importance of sustainable utilization of genetic resources thereby preserving Namibia's biodiversity and contributing to poverty reduction and the enhancement of the livelihoods of the people of Namibia.

The draft legislation on ABS for Sustainable Utilization of Cultural and Natural Assets, on which Natural Justice has been advising the Ministry of Environment and Tourism, will be presented to the participants of the workshop by Natural Justice and Namibian law firm Nakamhela Attorneys.

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Introduction to BCPs in la Mosquitia, Honduras

On the 21st of February, Johanna von Braun from Natural Justice participated in an introduction workshop on biocultural community protocols in Puerto Lempiras, capital of the Mosquitia region in Honduras. The workshop was facilitated the Central American regional office of IUCN, Mopawi, a Miskito NGO and Moskitia Asia Takanka (MASTA), the main representative body of the Miskito people. The Miskito are an indigenous community that stretches from the southern section of Honduras into the northern parts of Nicaragua inland and along the Moskito Coast by the Caribbean Sea. In Honduras the community comprise approximately 50000 people. 

The territory of the Miskito in Honduras includes the biggest section of pristine wilderness in Central America, made of mangrove swamps, lagoons, rivers, savannas and tropical rain forests as well as mountainous cloud forests. It also includes three protected areas and a UNESCO Biosphere. The community has long been fighting for their rights regarding land title, control over forest and marine resources as well as procedural rights such as their right to Free and Prior Informed Consent. They face a plethora of threats ranging from conflicts including with the protected areas, agricultural expansion, dams and fishing practices all of which they feel undermine their rights established under international law. 

During the workshop BCPs were introduced to members of MASTA, Mopawi as well as to a number of presidents of the community’s 300 territorial councils. Participants then discussed the value such instrument would bring to support their struggles and eventually decided to move forward with a BCP focusing on territorial and resource rights.

The meeting was followed by a second day of discussion in which IUCN ORMA presented to participants a recently commissioned legal analysis. The study outlines the short-comings of Honduras’ new forest law compared to international conventions regarding indigenous peoples rights, namely ILO Convention 169 as well as UNDRIP.

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19th Illegal Logging Update and Stakeholder Consultation

Peter Wood, Natural Justice Associate, attended the 19th Illegal Logging Update and Stakeholder Consultation, 9-10 February in London. The meeting focussed on the implementation of the EU Timber Regulation (EUTR), expected to come into force in March 2013, which could have far-reaching implications for the forest sector and forest dependent communities, as it is intended to eliminate illegally sourced wood products from the EU market. Some critics have suggested that by focussing too narrowly on screening for legality, EUTR and related efforts might enshrine socially unjust and environmentally destructive (yet legal) logging practices. Others claim that legality is a first and necessary step towards more progressive reforms. 

Mary Hobley (consultant to UK’s DIFD) presented on Poverty and Social Safeguards in Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPAs). She highlighted socially beneficial aspects of VPAs, including that they provide political space for deliberation on sensitive issues and re-assessment of the “rules of the game”, and help build civil society capacity to engage with policy development and implementation. She went into detail about attributes of effective social safeguards, noting that these can be preventative (in place before-the-fact, to avert conflict) or mitigative (capable of resolving conflict); and soft (process-based) or hard (legally enforceable). Lessons learned from the VPA process could be used to inform the development of effective safeguards within REDD+. 

All presentations are available at the Chatham House website here. 

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MPCA Workshop in Uttarakkand

Medicinal Plants Conservation Areas (MPCAs) in India are bioculturally rich areas of land with a high prevalence of endemic medicinal plants. MPCAs are usually demarcated by communities or by the government in partnership with traditional healers of the region with the aim of creating a medicinal plants in-situ gene bank which will also host medicinal plants nurseries. Medicinal plants from the nurseries in the MPCAs are then supplied by the traditional healers to the communities in the surrounding villages to set up home herbal gardens with instructions on the combination of plants to be used for a variety of illnesses. These home herbal gardens constitute a domestic pharmacy in every household thus meeting basic health care needs of communities living in remote areas not well serviced by roads and hospitals. Furthermore the MPCA along with home herbal gardens revitalize the traditional knowledge of communities hence leading to increased valuing and thereby conservation of the local ecosystem. Surrounding the MPCAs are buffer-zones called Medicinal Plants Development Areas (MPDAs) where both communities and traditional healers sustainably harvest medicinal plants for domestic consumption and sale in the local markets. 

On the 14-16 February 2012, Kabir Bavikatte and Harry Jonas of Natural Justice were at the Jim Corbett National Park (Uttarakhand, India) to provide technical support to UNDP-GEF’s "Mainstreaming Conservation and Sustainable Use of Medicinal Plant Diversity in Three Indian States" project, which is being implemented by the Ministry of Environment and Forests, UNDP and the Institute of Ayurveda and Integrative Medicine. In Jim Corbett National Park, the project is seeking to establish the Mohan MPCA through the local community with the permission of the forest department. A local management group (LMG) was constituted by representatives of the surrounding villages. The LMG was tasked with stewarding the MPCA along with developing a community knowledge register of relevant medicinal plants and associated traditional knowledge in the MPCA. 

Natural Justice facilitated a one day workshop providing a forum for community members and partners to engage in dialogue and to consider the legal ramifications of the Biodiversity Act for the project. Specifically, the group grappled with the question of how Community Knowledge Registers and LMGs developed under the project can become aligned with Peoples' Biodiversity Registers and Biodiversity Management Committees called for by the Act. The following day a community meeting developed the ideas of the first day, focusing particularly on the local challenges communities are facing in supporting the Mohan MPCA. Natural Justice also sought to support the LMG and the local NGO to develop a Biocultural Community Protocol that outlines their vision, plans and decision making structure for the governance and management of the MPCA.

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Meeting on Increasing Number of BCR Lawyers

On the 13th of February, Kabir Bavikatte and Harry Jonas (Natural Justice) met with Antara Lahiri (Ashoka Law for All) and Vivek Maru (Namati) to discuss how best to increase the numbers of lawyers focusing on the nexus between the environment, land and social justice issues. Particularly it was felt that opportunities for students and young lawyers to engage with the issues presented a barrier to being able to "imagine" working in the area. The few job opportunities offered, despite the demand from communities, community-based organizations and NGOs, was suggested as another serious barrier to individuals who are interested. A meeting has been mooted to further discuss the issues with a view to developing means to address the problem. Kabir and Harry thank Antara and Vivek for their time.

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Maldhari Community Claims Traditional Lands

In the face of government attempts to ban livestock in their traditional grasslands, the Maldhari community of the Banni grasslands of Kutch, Gujarat, India sent notices to their state government demanding recognition of their rights over the grasslands on the first week of February. Fifteen of 19 village panchayats in the region joined in this action. The notices claim the Maldhari’s are entitled to manage their own grasslands by the Forest Rights Act (FRA) of 2006, pointing to the fact that they have grazed their livestock in the area for centuries and were formally given the right to use the land for grazing by the leader of Kutch in the 19th century. 

With about 100,000 livestock, many in the Maldhari community depend upon livestock to sustain their livelihoods. Sajheevan, an Indian NGO and partner of Natural Justice, estimates that livestock on the grasslands produce 110,000 litres of milk daily and that annually the livestock economy contributes one billion Indian rupees (about $20 million) to the region. 

In 2009, the Maldharis drafted a biocultural community protocol (BCP) with support from Sajheevan and Natural Justice. The BCP documents the vital role played by the Maldharis in guarding their region’s biodiversity and in co-evolving with/selectively breeding indigenous livestock ideally suited to the climate for at least 450 years. The Maldharis are also members of the Asia BCP Initiative.

Read more about the Maldhari's demands here. Download the Maldhari's BCP here. 

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