Pitfalls and Pipelines - Philippine Indigenous Peoples Links

Part 3: Concluding Observations
339
The Four Corners region of the United States is an area of
primarily indigenous lands. 1 In 1973 it was officially declared
a “National Sacrifice area,” owing to the sacrifice that was requested
of its indigenous inhabitants to strip its resources of
uranium, coal, oil and gas to fuel the US Cold War military
machine. The consequences, both in terms of poverty, environmental
damage and health issues from the uranium and
coal, have been dire. 2 This example of wholly unacceptable
and unsustainable development has been repeated in so many
different places for indigenous peoples. This publication has
established that, despite advances in international human
rights law, there is still a gross lack of adequate protective
measures for indigenous peoples or their ancestral lands. It
has also established that economic, social and environmental
sustainability can hardly be seen in the practice of extractive
industries, despite the formulation of a concept called “sustainable
mining.” In most developing countries the natural resource
curse remains the rule, not the exception. Indigenous
peoples, who are usually the original inhabitants of territories
where the extractive industry corporations operate, suffer
from this curse.
Extractive industry companies have, either individually or
through their industry bodies, conducted various dialogues
with different indigenous groups. Access to such discussions,
however, had been variable and ad hoc. Despite clear expressions
in all these discussions of the need for the industry to
respect the rights of indigenous peoples contained in the UN
Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP)
and ILO Convention 169, including their right to free, prior
and informed consent or FPIC, companies have so far failed
to do so. This has deepened the significant levels of distrust