Victoria Tauli-Corpuz (left), with Guatemalan activist Rosalina Tuyuc.
© Ancellet/Rapho, Paris
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Key indicators
Population
(millions, 1998): 72.9
GNP ($ billions): 78.9
GNP per capita
($): 1,050
Population below
income poverty line of $1 a day (%): 18.7
Source: UNDP Human
Development Report 2000
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In the mid-1970s, the Igorot people
won fame for fighting the largely World Bank-funded Chico River Dam project. Now,
their survival is increasingly linked to changing the rules of international trade,
as a leading advocate explains
 I had become a student activist after living in Manila at
the height of the anti-Vietnam War movement, but I was firmly convinced that my future
lay in going back home to help organize my native people, the Igorots1. Since martial
law had been declared in 1972, the only legitimate way for us to operate was through
NGOs. Six years later I created one to organize villagers and set up community-based
health programmes.
We raised the social and political awareness of our people, and mobilized them against
the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos. We understood that we were oppressed and discriminated
against as indigenous people, and that therefore we should struggle for self-determination
and regional autonomy. In the 1980s, the government was finally forced to cancel
the Chico River Dam Project because of our sustained opposition. This project would
have displaced around 300,000 Igorots.
At the time we could already see the value of international networking to gather
support for our struggles against military rule in many of our communities. We discovered
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and used it to strengthen our cause.
Indigenous peoples also became active in lobbying the United Nations to address human
rights violations of indigenous peoples. Since the creation in 1982 of a UN Working
Group on Indigenous Populations, indigenous peoples have regularly taken part in
drafting minimum standards for the protection of their rights. I am, however, a strong
believer in the primacy of local and national struggles over international action.
Without strong resistance on the ground, international campaigns will fail. The fall
of the Marcos dictatorship came about primarily because of the protests of the poor
majority, which had built up for more than 20 years within the country. Only once
the regime became widely unpopular did the elite Filipinos and the international
community start to withdraw some support from it.
But I have also seen how decisions or agreements reached by international institutions
like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IIMF) can erode gains achieved
locally. From the late 1970s to the 1980s, I helped to set up community-based health
programmes, only to see the structural adjustment policies and programmes of the
World Bank and IIMF lead to budget cuts in health, while liberalization of our investment
and trade laws set back much of our progress.
The struggle for ancestral land rights, for instance, was undermined by the Mining
Act of l995, which allows foreign mining corporations to have 100 per cent foreign
equity and a 75-year lease on a maximum of 81,000 hectares of mineral lands. The
Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act (IPRA), a new law passed in 1998, rectified some of
the damage but falls short of what we want. The mining corporations have nevertheless
filed a suit in the Supreme Court questioning its constitutionality.
We were told that to develop, we have to shift from producing for our domestic use
to producing for the world market. But those who shifted to cash crop production
are now going bankrupt because of the dumping of highly-subsidized, imported agricultural
products from foreign countries. Cheap ready-to-fry sliced potatoes, corn, oranges
and pears, frozen-dressed chicken and other foods are being dumped in the country,
destroying the livelihoods of tens of thousands of farmers. The commitments of the
Philippine government, particularly relating to agriculture as part of the Uruguay
Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, has allowed this to happen.
This situation is not unique to the Philippines. Our Quechua sisters from Peru share
a similar story. Their potatoes are now left to rot in the fields because they cannot
compete with cheap, dumped processed potato slices from North America. Imported maize
or corn has also destroyed the traditional corn production of indigenous peoples
in Mexico. Food insecurity and the loss of livelihoods are worsening each day.
Of course, we argue that our governments should be blamed because they signed these
agreements, and also because they push an unsustainable economic model that is debt-driven,
export-oriented and import-dependent.
In our own voice
But we are not blind to the powers of the
World Trade Organization, the IMF and World Bank, and bodies like the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD) or the Group of Eight. Those economies that do not fall
in line become pariahs. The globalization of the production and consumption systems
of the few elite countries, corporations and individuals is a threat to the continued
existence of diverse and sustainable indigenous livelihoods.
This is the main reason why Tebtebba was set up in 1996. After doing work on the
local and national levels, I felt that there was a gap. Global decisions directly
impact on our daily lives and can erode gains achieved through years of hard work.
Yet we have no chance to influence these decisions. Our absence in the global arena
allows others to speak for us, and in many instances we are misrepresented. Tebtebba
is a Kankana-ey-Igorot term for discourse and I thought this was an appropriate name
for an Indigenous Peoples’ International Centre for Policy Research and Education.
Indigenous peoples are pushing hard for the UN to adopt the Declaration on the Rights
of Indigenous Peoples, and are campaigning to slow down or halt unfettered globalization.
Tebtebba took the lead in researching and writing on globalization and indigenous
peoples. In Seattle, we adopted the “Seattle Declaration of Indigenous Peoples.”
Among other things, this called for the removal from the Wto of the Trade-Related
Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights—a legal device allowing corporations to appropriate
our diverse biological and genetic resources, along with our traditional knowledge,
and to patent life itself.
We still have a long way to go. We need all kinds of partnerships, even with governments,
to bring about a world which allows us to exist as distinct peoples and where social,
economic and environmental justice reigns.
1. The Igorots are indigenous people from six ethno-linguistic
tribes—the Ibaloy, Kankana-ey, Ifugao, Kalinga, Apayao/Isneg and the Bontoc—living
in the rugged Cordillera region in the northern Philippines. All six tribes share
common traits, including religious beliefs based on nature. The total population
of Igorots in the region stands at 1.2 million according to the 1995 census.
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