Pitfalls and Pipelines - Philippine Indigenous Peoples Links

4 Pitfalls and Pipelines: Indigenous Peoples and Extractive Industries
The surviving lands of indigenous peoples include many
of the most vulnerable and threatened ecosystems on our
planet. Indigenous peoples have always made clear that they
are culturally, spiritually, and economically interlinked with
those lands. They, however, continue to suffer abuse of their
rights, because of the desecration of these ecosystems that they
hold sacred. Nowhere is this more keenly felt than with regard
to the extractive industries.
While indigenous peoples welcome genuine efforts from
the extractive industries to respect human rights and raise
environmental standards around projects, there is also a serious
concern that modern large-scale mining, oil and gas projects
cannot be squared with their own visions for their selfdetermined
development. Although for instance the mining
industry has recently created the phrase “sustainable mining,”
it misrepresents the fundamental nature of mining, which is
founded on the primary extraction of a non-renewable resource
from the earth.
The “low-hanging fruit” in terms of mineral and fossil
fuel deposits have already been plucked. Increasingly, for
mining the global trend is for the exploitation of lower grade
ore bodies, which leads to a need for mining projects to increase
in scale, and extend over wider—and often virgin, or
“greenfield,” territories. For oil and gas, increasing prices and
new technologies, such as tar sands and “fracking” (hydraulic
fracturing), have opened up whole new areas to commercial
production. 2 A further push is driven by companies seeking
resources outside of the control of National Oil Companies
(i.e., state entities), which account for some three-quarters of
the world’s oil and gas production. 3
On top of these expanding impacts, there has also been an
increase for demand for minerals and fossil fuels. In the last 10
years alone, iron ore production has increased by 180 percent,
cobalt by 165 percent and coal by 44 percent, while the oil
multinational Exxon estimates global energy demand will rise
35 percent between 2005 and 2030. 4 Demand for metals that
feed sustainable energy and/or new technology needs, such as
lithium and certain rare earth elements, has similarly grown.
This has led the Gaia Foundation, in their recent report, to