Pitfalls and Pipelines - Philippine Indigenous Peoples Links

Chapter 2.2: Challenges at the National Policy Level
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responsibility for the mineral resource area to Greenland’s
Self-Government authorities. 2 There are also progressive provisions
in the Constitutions of Venezuela and the Plurinational
State of Bolivia, Colombia’s 1993 law recognizing collective
rights to territory, and in Australia’s Northern Territories, via
its 1976 Aboriginal Land Rights Act. 3
Even where there are enlightened laws, however, how
they are implemented is another question. This report carries
examples of problems in implementation from many of the
countries mentioned above. 4 In the case of the Philippines,
a presentation at the 2009 Manila Conference by Rhia Muhi,
outlined how seven million hectares, out of the country’s
total landmass of 30 million hectares, are estimated to be the
ancestral domains of indigenous peoples as defined by the
1997 IPRA. Yet indigenous peoples are still among the poorest
of the poor in the country. IPRA prescribed the provision
of the 1987 Philippine Constitution of indigenous peoples to
their ancestral domains, and theoretically all the resources
therein. The state, through its 1995 Mining Act, however,
claimed ownership, under the Regalian Doctrine, of the subsoil
resources. There is an inherent clash between these two
principles. Experience shows that attempts at harmonizing
IPRA with other laws, always leads to the lower priority being
assigned to IPRA. Ms Muhi noted that recent studies found
that over 70 percent of the mining and logging operations on
indigenous lands were being conducted without their FPIC,
regardless of the provisions of IPRA. 5 This was borne out by a
joint submission to the UN Committee on the Elimination of
all forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) on the Philippines
in 2009. The report was based on widespread consultations
among indigenous peoples that raised numerous concerns,
and proposed various recommendations, based on the premise
that the Philippine state had interpreted IPRA on behalf
of corporate interests, as opposed to that of the indigenous
peoples it was intended for. 6
A similar situation, of a clash between expectations and
reality has occurred in Peru. In response to a history of increasingly
violent protests, the new populist Government of
Ollanta Humala, passed the ground-breaking Consultation