Ladies and Gentlemen,
Colleagues,
Honourable Ministers,
Indigenous Peoples’ Representatives,

Sustainability is at the heart of all successful development efforts. Sustainable development respects and responds to local conditions, whether cultural or environmental. And that includes respecting the needs of indigenous peoples and recognizing the important contribution that they can make, and are already making, to sustainability.

Although the original Rio summit of 1992 recognized the essential role of indigenous peoples in development, this is a message that we have to repeat again and again.

Because today, indigenous peoples are still paying a price for wanting to preserve their identity and culture and to keep control over their territories and resources. They are still, too often, victims of discrimination. They are still disproportionately poor. Consider that indigenous peoples make up just 5 per cent of the world’s population, but they are 15 per cent of those living in poverty.

Today, with the demand for land greater than ever, indigenous peoples risk not only losing their land and control of their resources, but losing their very way of life. And they are not the only ones who would be the poorer for it.

Indigenous peoples have much to teach us about how to live, how to work, and how to cultivate in a sustainable manner that does not jeopardize future generations.

Food and nutrition security must be based on a shared conviction that all people have a right to be free from hunger. To reach that goal, we need inclusive processes, inclusive actions, and inclusive outcomes. IFAD’s Policy on Engagement with Indigenous Peoples promotes equitable access to land, territories and resources, as well as a demand-driven approach to ensure that resources are managed directly by communities and their organizations.

I want to stress not just the needs of indigenous peoples, but also their contributions, and their enormous untapped potential, particularly for sustainable development. Indigenous peoples often have unique knowledge of the natural world and its processes. They are custodians of a large part of the world’s biodiversity. Their traditions and their outlook stress the deep connection between human societies and the natural world. Clearly, they have an essential role to play in sustainable development.

If we work with them and listen to them we can heighten our awareness of the unsustainable practices that ultimately threaten everyone’s survival. And their traditions offer us techniques evolved over centuries that work with ecosystems and not against them.

Indigenous peoples have reminded us of the “culture” in agriculture. And that sustainable development is social and cultural, as well as economic and environmental. 

IFAD has a long history of working with indigenous peoples. IFAD’s first loan to support indigenous peoples was in 1979, for a project in Bolivia. In the following decades our involvement has expanded and deepened. As of 2011, IFAD had financed more than $1.6 billion in loans in support of indigenous peoples.

As our partnership with indigenous peoples has evolved, we have taken steps to enable indigenous peoples to be in control of their own development efforts. In 2007 we created the IFAD Indigenous Peoples Facility, to provide micro-grants at the grassroots level for indigenous communities. The small projects funded by the facility are designed and managed by the communities themselves. Indigenous leaders make up a majority of the facility’s governing board, and indigenous peoples’ organizations co-manage the facility at the regional level.

Another pillar of our engagement with indigenous peoples is full and effective participation in IFAD’s processes. The Indigenous Peoples Forum was established at IFAD within the framework of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to improve our own work with these communities and address their concerns. The first global meeting of the Forum will take place in February 2013, in conjunction with our General Council meeting. It gives indigenous peoples another opportunity to assess our projects and  to help us implement IFAD’s Policy with indigenous peoples.

IFAD is also committed to gathering and sharing best practices. We do not have to look far to find examples. In Peru, we have funded a series of successful projects over the past two decades. The original project adopted a methodology that drew upon the cultural, mythological and religious traditions of the community and what they had to say about how we relate to Mother Earth. Or to put it another way, the project was successful because it drew upon the natural resource management embedded in the culture. Families and communities made use of native seeds and organic fertilizers, and were able to double or triple their production.

Our policy also acknowledges the particular need to engage with indigenous women, to help them overcome their material poverty and assert their rights. IFAD’s efforts have contributed, in a culturally sensitive way, to a gender balance in the control of resources which has facilitated a shift in the unequal power relations within households and communities. 

We know that empowering women is one of the best ways to fight hunger and poverty, and this is as true of indigenous communities as it is of communities in general. In Panama, for example,  a grant to an indigenous women’s  network helped to prevent the extinction of traditional knowledge related to agricultural biodiversity and handicraft techniques, as well as the loss of native seeds and cultivation practices.

A project in the Philippines is helping to support the use and preservation of traditional knowledge among indigenous women in poor urban communities. Traditional rural communities use every space of the land, even stone walls, productive for vegetables, medicinal herbs and root crops. The women are helping to spread community-based waste management while also increasing their food sources—and raising their own social and economic status in the community.

People have a right to determine their own futures. Each culture is a way of living in the world. Indigenous peoples must be part  of any sustainable development strategies, not only because it is their right, but because of how much they have to share with all of us about living sustainably on this planet.

Thank you.   

Rio de Janeiro
19 June 2012