Pitfalls and Pipelines - Philippine Indigenous Peoples Links

342 Pitfalls and Pipelines: Indigenous Peoples and Extractive Industries
these. Training-workshops should be organized both by relevant
UN bodies and programs, human rights organizations
and by indigenous peoples’ organizations and institutions,
which can provide them the knowledge on how to use these
to help address their issues related to extractive industry
corporations. How to make corporations adhere to minimum
international norms and standards on human rights and environment
is a cross-cutting mandate of many of these policies
and mechanisms.
Obviously, indigenous peoples who have to cope with the
day-to-day struggles to simply survive and protect their territories
do not have the luxury of understanding, and much less,
using all these. This is where support groups (e.g., PIPLinks
and indigenous peoples’ institutions like Tebtebba) can come
in to help them know about the existence of these. Indigenous
peoples deserve to know the range of possibilities and options
they can use to seek redress for the wrongs committed against
them.
3.1 Prospects for the future
This publication, and the 2009 International Conference
on Extractive Industries and Indigenous Peoples upon which
it is based, have considered a number of themes. In looking to
the future, the focus will be on the struggle of indigenous peoples,
but it is worth first reviewing the future of the extractive
industries. Given the nature of extractive operations, it is clear
that these industries cannot be left to direct their own patterns
of development. Various stakeholders must, for example,
work to minimize overall fossil fuel use and production. Use
and production of oil and coal, without any question, has to
decrease significantly. Since the recovery and recycling of most
metals can lead to a significant reduction in global mining impacts,
especially to greenfield mining activities, an emphasis
on recycling and substitution are a necessary contribution to
a more sustainable world. But the extractive industry alone
is unlikely to take such steps while current practices remain