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	Supreme Court must uphold indigenous land rights by Francisco Cali Tzay Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples Brazil   26 Aug. 2021   Indigenous people protest ahead of landmark ruling on land claims in Brazil. (reuters, agencies)   Hundreds of indigenous people danced and chanted outside Brazil's Supreme Court on Wednesday to urge the justices not to rule in favor of a cut-off date of 1988 for their land claims, a proposal backed by the farming sector.   The protest has drawn an unprecedented 6,000 indigenous people from 176 tribes to camp out in the Brazilian capital to press the court to reject the timeframe, organizers said.   A defeat in court for the indigenous people could set a precedent for the dramatic rollback of native rights which far-right President Jair Bolsonaro advocates. He says too few of them live on too much land, blocking agricultural expansion.   "The Bolsonaro government wants to do away with us. If it was up to him there would be no indigenous people left in Brazil," said Xukuru chieftain Ricardo from northeast Brazil. He wore a long headdress of blue macaw feathers and held a maraca.   The demonstrators displayed banners that said "Marco Temporal NO," rejecting the time frame adopted in 2016. By late afternoon, the court had still not begun debating the issue.   The ruling will affect 230 pending land claims, many of which offer a bulwark against deforestation in the Amazon rainforest. Most have been awaiting recognition for decades.   Powerful farming interests would have firmer legal ground to challenge indigenous land claims and Congress would have the green light to write a restrictive definition of indigenous lands into federal law.   The case rose to the Supreme Court in an appeal by the Xokleng people of southern Santa Catarina state against what they argued is an overly narrow interpretation of indigenous rights by recognizing only lands occupied by native communities at the time Brazil's constitution was ratified in 1988.   The Xokleng were cleared off their traditional hunting grounds over a century ago to make room for European settlers, mostly Germans fleeing economic and political turmoil. If they win the case, 830 farmers face eviction from smallholdings their families have lived on for decades.   http://news.globallandscapesforum.org/54761/struggle-for-life-movement-becomes-largest-indigenous-mobilization-in-brazilian-history/ http://www.iwgia.org/en/news/4515-fighting-for-their-rights-in-the-streets-of-brasilia.html http://apiboficial.org/?lang=en http://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/10/indigenous-warrior-women-brazil-ancestral-lands-protest http://e360.yale.edu/features/land-grabbers-the-growing-assault-on-brazils-indigenous-areas http://e360.yale.edu/features/for-the-kayapo-a-long-battle-to-save-their-amazon-homeland http://e360.yale.edu/features/an-amazon-defender-stands-up-for-her-land-and-her-people   23 Aug. 2021 (OHCHR)   The Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples has called on the Brazilian Supreme Court to secure the rights of indigenous peoples to their lands and to reject a legal argument being promoted by some businesses that want to exploit natural resources on traditional indigenous lands.   “Acceptance of this argument would result in significant denial of justice for many indigenous peoples seeking the recognition of their traditional land rights, and under the Constitution indigenous peoples are entitled to the permanent possession of the lands they traditionally occupy,” said Francisco Cali Tzay, UN Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples.   “If the Supreme Court accepts the so-called Marco Temporal (“time frame” argument) in its ruling on land demarcation later this month, it could legitimize violence against indigenous peoples and inflame conflicts in the Amazon rainforest and other areas,” he said.   The Supreme Court’s expected ruling on 25 August on the Extraordinary Appeal No. 1.017.365 will guide the federal government and future courts in settling indigenous land issues and addressing indigenous rights.   “The court’s decision will not only determine the future of these issues in Brazil for years to come, it will also signal whether the country intends to live up to its international human rights obligations and whether it will respect indigenous communities who were not allowed to participate in legal proceedings that revoked their land rights,” Tzay said.   He said it is vital that the Supreme Court – and all public institutions and authorities – abide by legal standards, including the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the International Labour Organization Convention No. 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples.   At issue is a legal argument, called the Marco Temporal, which indigenous advocates fear could legalise theft of indigenous lands. Business interests that want to exploit indigenous lands for mining and industrial agriculture argue that indigenous peoples must prove they occupied the lands at the time of Brazil’s constitution was adopted in 1988.   “Ironically, this very Constitution was supposed to have guaranteed their land rights,” Tzay said. Indigenous peoples and human rights activists argue that the Constitution does not set any time limits on indigenous land rights. They also argue that this arbitrary date ignores the fact that indigenous peoples may have been forcibly removed from their lands before then.   “Indigenous peoples’ rights to the land do not stem from a grant from the state, but originate from the very fact that they are the original inhabitants, and lived on these lands long before Europeans came to Brazil,” he said.   “I call on the Brazilian Supreme Court to uphold indigenous peoples’ rights to their traditional lands, territories and natural resources,” said Tzay. 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	Indigenous Peoples’ local agroecological food systems bring valuable lessons of resilience by Cass Madden IIED, International Network of Mountain Indigenous Peoples (INMIP)   Aug. 2021   When the COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to a halt in early 2020, people around the globe were left struggling to support themselves and their families, without work or transport, and facing shortages of products from toilet paper to basic foodstuffs.   The pandemic laid bare the vulnerabilities of global food supply chains that rely on long distance transportation, and of farming systems that depend on access to markets to purchase external inputs and sell products. But it also highlighted the tremendous resilience of the self-reliant biocultural food systems of Indigenous Peoples around the world.   Indigenous mountain communities – from Peru to Kenya to Tajikistan, Bhutan and Papua New Guinea – were able to ensure the food security and health of their communities thanks to their localised, biodiverse, circular food systems founded on ancestral knowledge and cultural values.   These communities have maintained and strengthened their Indigenous food systems through participation in community-to-community learning exchanges organised by the International Network of Mountain Indigenous Peoples (INMIP), a global network of Indigenous farming communities spanning 11 countries.   INMIP has worked for nearly a decade on collective organisation and intercultural exchange to create momentum for global food systems transformation, seeking to reorient industrial and globalised food systems towards sustainable, local and native alternatives.   This work has united communities around emblematic crops (such as potato in Peru, cowpea in Kenya or aromatic rice in India) that form the basis of biocultural food systems that have sustained Indigenous Peoples for generations.   These crops not only sustain Indigenous farmers in centres of origin, but today are among the world’s most important sources of calories.   INMIP farmers are experts in producing these globally important crops, maintaining and enhancing their genetic diversity to adapt to climate change. But the knowledge, innovation and resilience of Indigenous producers has become increasingly invisible as these crops have become more and more industrialised.   As urban populations around the world suffered the parallel disasters of COVID-19 infections and food shortages, these Indigenous farming communities reaped productive harvests.   The economic and health crises were particularly strong in cities, where people live far away from food producing landscapes.   In the global South, many city residents are themselves former farmers, who left behind their lands chasing the promise of economic opportunities.   But the neoliberal economic model, reliant on massive global markets that consolidate wealth in the hands of a few while individuals (and even states) scrape by, failed these urban migrants the world over.   The pandemic exposed their vulnerabilities: no formal employment contracts to guarantee them state protections, no formal housing to keep their families isolated and safe, and insufficient economic resources to afford adequate food.   Thus, global urbanisation was reversed, with migrants abandoning cities and returning to the lands they had left behind.   INMIP farmers in India’s Eastern Himalayas reported that “despite the many challenges that the pandemic has brought, we see a positive side: many returning urban migrants using ancient and traditional practices started growing native food crops, preparing meals using native crops and wild plants and even began marketing some of these products to support their livelihoods.   They are earning profit from ancient practices and knowledge, proving that one does not need to move to the city to have economic opportunities”.   INMIP communities reported few infections and no COVID-19-related deaths. The power of nutritious, native and local food has become obvious as the pandemic has endured.   INMIP draws on the traditional farming knowledge held by Indigenous communities around the world which has maintained productive and balanced food producing ecosystems for thousands of years.   Our increasingly uncertain world with multiple and interconnected challenges – from climate change to food insecurity to pandemics – highlights the resilience of Indigenous farming communities more than ever before.   INMIP communities have responded to climate change, nurtured solidarity economies – prioritising social profitability over purely financial profit – and developed strategies of caring for the environment, particularly conserving biodiversity, food-producing habitats and natural water systems.   “Healthy lands produce healthy foods and farming native crops is much better because we know these strengthen our immunity and resistance to diseases like COVID-19,” says Ricardina Paco Condori, a farmer from the Parque de la Papa (Potato Park) in the southern Peruvian Andes.   As the world looks towards post-COVID-19 recovery, these Indigenous communities share important lessons about resilience in the face of shocks and challenges.   The upcoming UN Food Systems Summit presents a crucial opportunity to reimagine our food system – one that contributes to a world that is healthy, just and sustainable for all.   But the summit has been co-opted by corporate and green revolution agendas, pushing a belief that we can engineer ourselves out of any crisis, while sidelining the Indigenous and traditional food knowledge that has sustained our species for all of time.   Why should we rely on genetically modified crops, chemical fertilisers and artificial growing environments – whose long-term consequences for our already suffering planet are grim – when Indigenous and smallholder farmers around the world are implementing innovative solutions that preserve biodiversity, biocultural heritage and increase resilience and productivity?   INMIP invites us all to think about our relationship to food, to the natural world, and to the interspecies relationships that sustain us.   The success of these communities in confronting the largest global crisis in a generation – not just surviving it, but thriving despite tremendous obstacles – proves that an alternative world is possible.   * Cass Madden is the coordinator and project manager for the secretariat of the International Network of Mountain Indigenous Peoples Visit the related web page
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