Pitfalls and Pipelines - Philippine Indigenous Peoples Links

Foreword
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Foreword
The extractive industry (mining, oil and gas extraction)
and its impacts on indigenous peoples is a historical and continuing
problem. The International Labor Organization paid
its attention, for the first time, to indigenous peoples in the
early 1950s when some researchers came up with reports of
slave-like labor conditions of indigenous miners in Bolivia.
Up to now, at the international arena, when indigenous peoples
make their interventions, there are always cases of how
extractive industries displaced indigenous peoples from their
territories or destroyed their communities. What is more
disheartening are the ceaseless reports of continuing violence
and grave human rights violations against indigenous peoples
in communities where oil, gas or mineral extraction is taking
place.
This is the main reason why, as the Chairperson of the
UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues together with
other Forum members, we pushed for a recommendation at
the Seventh Session (2008) that extractive industries be a subject
of an expert workshop before the Forum’s Eight Session
(2009). For this to materialize, we had to agree that there
would be no budgetary implications for the UN. This meant
that we would have to raise the money on our own to do this.
If we pushed that this be funded by the UN, there was a high
risk that the Finance office of the UN would not approve this
and such a workshop would not see the light of day.
Fortunately, there were donors and UN entities who willingly
contributed. We owe our thanks to The Christensen
Fund, the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation