(English) March 15, 2013
Forestry bill will continue to destroy land and forests, ensure indigenous communities and organizations.
Indigenous Communities and Organizations for the Ancestral Forest, made up of about twenty Mapuche groups, presented on March 11 a declaration directed to the United Nations Special Rapporteurs Oliver De Schutter, about the right to food, and Raquel Rolnik, about the right to housing, denouncing the damaging effects of the Chilean forest policy, which endangers their right to food and ancestral sovereignty over their territory.
The statement accuses the government of President Sebastián Piñera of encouraging “a new charge to approve — with utmost urgency — the Forestry Development Bill, legislated without consultation, which extends Decree Law 701 by 20 years [2013-2032].” The statement also denounces the National Indigenous Consultation, put into effect by the Executive in 2011, for violating the essential requirements of the International Labor Organization’s Convention 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples.
“Convention 169 mandates a state to carry out prior consultation when legislation is proposed by the government,” indicates the declaration. However, this right is restricted because, according to a 2009 decree, it deals with a procedure in which the interested indigenous parties only “can express [their] opinion” about legislative or administrative measures that affect them directly, but it does not take consent into account.
The Forestry Development Bill, under debate in the House of Representatives since the second semester of 2012, extends the scope of Decree Law 701, approved by the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-90) in 1974, which regulates “forestry preferably in soils that can sustain forestry and in degraded soils, and incentivizes forestation, specially by small forestry owners and [forestation] necessary to prevent degradation, protect and recover the soils of the national territory.”
Decree Law 701 ended indigenous communal property, deepening conflicts between the State and the Mapuche people.
In almost 40 years of being in effect, this regulation has allowed the expansion of pine tree and eucalyptus monoculture at the expense of the Mapuche territory in the south of Chile, ensure the indigenous organizations. Each year 27,000 hectares (67,000 acres) of native forest disappear.
“The native forest is part of the habitat of the indigenous peoples, of their cultural integrity, part of their historic and archeological patrimony. Hence, [it is] important for their survival,” says the statement, adding that the bill “denies the possibility of developing soils for varied agriculture, which ensures food sovereignty (self-sufficiency), medicine, food, and cattle raising,” in accordance with their ancestral Good Living practices.
Likewise, the statement maintains that “fertilization and weed control has been a disastrous practice for the crops, flora, and fauna of the indigenous communities near the forestry companies because of the use of agricultural herbicides such as Glyphosate, which contains carcinogenic compounds.”
The indigenous groups rejected the bill “which will end up plundering the forests and indigenous territories” and if approved, it would constitute “a social and environmental crime.”
Source: Latinamerica Press
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