Message from the UN Forum on Forests Secretariat
in Commemoration of the
International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples
“The Cause of Indigenous Peoples is Ours”
9 August 2005
It is with great pleasure that I join in the chorus of congratulations on this momentous occasion and celebrate with you the great contribution of the world’s Indigenous Peoples to our global heritage.
The theme chosen for this celebration, “The Cause of Indigenous Peoples is Ours,” is particularly relevant for our work in the UN Forum on Forests, which has been given the task of promoting management, conservation and sustainable development of all types of forests.
Many Indigenous Peoples are forest dwellers, whether those forests be the deciduous or conifer forests of the taiga region or the tropical forests of Latin America, Africa or South-East Asia. Having lived in and cared for these forests for millennia, Indigenous Peoples offer the most shining example of the internalization of the concept of sustainable development. Their cultural, spiritual and material livelihoods are intertwined with the health of the environment in which they live. Their innate understanding and reverence for the link between sustainability and the health of future generations is something that many in the rest of the world still struggle to learn and incorporate into decision making and behaviour. Their constant presence in the forests ensures in most cases that they continue to be managed sustainably and remain biologically diverse. Their traditional knowledge of the area and of the various flora and fauna has great potential to contribute to modern ailments but is also crucial for their own survival.
This simple and most basic need continues to be a struggle in the face of national development needs as well as blanket protection and conservation schemes. Issues of land tenure, sharing of access and benefits to forest resources, and protection and use of traditional knowledge are key to ensuring that our common need to use forest resources for economic development and our desire to protect and conserve this natural resource do not come at the expense of our increasingly vulnerable forest-dependent communities. Ensuring land tenure, property rights and benefit sharing schemes that extend to the women and local communities that use and care for our forests, thus providing incentives for sustainable use of natural resources is of major concern to international and domestic forest policy makers.
The cause of Indigenous Peoples is inextricably linked to the cause of sustainable environmental management and the future of our common global health. The cause of Indigenous Peoples is indeed ours.
