Keepers of the past,

holders of the future

I AM DELIGHTED to address this International Congress on Indigenous Peoples,
which is the world’s first gathering to commemorate 1993 as the United Nations Year
of Indigenous Peoples.
I note that our activities here on behalf of the world’s indigenous peoples will dovetail
with our celebration of Earth Day on April 22—and this supports the fond belief of
environmentalists, to which I adhere—that everything in our planet is interconnected,
as you have already stated here, and that seemingly unrelated events are bound
together in a continuum of cause and effect.
Every little thing that we do casts a ripple of consequence in our only global home—
our planet, our Mother Earth; hence the environmentalists, call to “think globally, but
act locally.”
Partners for the present
The theme of this conference—”Indigenous People and Youth Partnership for
Sustainable Development”—impresses me as one that has great promise for
creating new teamwork and synergy in environmental protection.
It is truly fitting that our indigenous peoples—the keepers of the past—would join
with our youth—the holders of the future—in a partnership to benefit the present.
The energies and the potentials to be realized and unleashed by such a partnership
are tremendous.
The youth can learn a lot from indigenous people, whose traditional ways are being
held up as models for the sustainable use of our planet’s limited resources.
On the other hand, indigenous people should find in the youth enthusiastic
advocates of their right to live freely in their ancestral lands. Such an advocacy
should add to the continuing empowerment of indigenous people.
Today, from various tribes all over the world represented here on this platform at the
Parliamentary Hall of the House of Representatives of the Philippines, indigenous
people are speaking out and acting against the mindless development that threatens
their homes, their natural environment, their cultures and even their lives.
Environmental horrors
In their cause, these indigenous people have been helped by international agencies,
non-Government organizations and other environmental groups. But I agree with the
organizers of this conference that the cause of the indigenous people might be
advanced by our youth—ang ating mga kabataang Filipino—in the case of the
Philippines.
After all, it is today’s youth that will determine the course of tomorrow’s development.
And a greater understanding and appreciation, by our youth, of indigenous people
and their ways should lead to a kinder, more compassionate and more enlightened
treatment of indigenous people in the future.
A key aim of this conference, then, is to increase contact between the youth and the
indigenous people, by which each gains a better understanding of a greater respect
for each other.
But it is not enough to just be enhancing our understanding of indigenous people that
will save them from their plight. Much more should be done to save the world from
environmental danger. For one thing, environmental degradation has reached
colossal proportions. There is global warming and ozone-layer depletion. There is
global climatic change. There is massive soil erosion and desertification. There is
biodiversity loss of almost 100 species a day. There is acid rain and there is red tide.
These environmental horrors have outgrown national boundaries, yet for all the hope
inspired by the 1992 Earth Summit, a real international effort to address these
problems has still to be mounted.
In the meantime, individual nations seek to contain global environmental problems
by attending to the smaller, contributory problems that can be addressed on a
national and local level. Thus we have conservation and management programs for
forests, agricultural lands, coastal areas and freshwater resources. Thus we have
programs to control air and water pollution, and to control and recycle waste. Thus
we have programs to slow down the rapid growth of population.
Subsistence and survival
All of these programs cost massive amounts of money. And money is something a
developing country such as the Philippines does not have much of. In truth, money is
something most Filipinos have very little of. Unfortunately, such poverty results in a
grim economy of subsistence and survival, which turns out to be most harmful to the
environment. The painful dilemma, therefore, is how to balance our duty to take care
of our indigenous people and the need of our country to develop. While, as we shall
later see, these prerogatives are not mutually exclusive, they have often clashed in
the past, and their collision has had tragic results for many indigenous people.
Let me elaborate on this a little bit more.
On one hand, you have indigenous people who live in ancestral lands that have
already been shrunk by colonization. But because these people practice the old
ways—ways that have always been harmonious with nature—their lands have
retained much of their viability, much of their vitality and the rain-forest abode is still
alive and relatively unexploited.
On the other hand, you have the poor peasants and landless farmers who have been
driven by poverty to the lands and forests of the indigenous people. Unaware that
the rain-forest ecosystem has very shallow soils ill-suited to cultivation, these tillers
clear the trees, plant their crops, harvest only to abandon the land when it becomes
unproductive after a few planting cycles.
In this clash of seemingly irreconcilable cultures, we see the tragic outcome:
Indigenous people lose their forest dwellings, landless peasants remain as landless
and as poor as ever, biodiversity is lost, and a once lush rain forest is turned into an
unfertile clearing. Yet, as two rain-forest ecologists have said, “To blame colonizing
peasants for uprooting tribal people and burning the rain forest is tantamount to
blaming soldiers for causing wars.”
You and I know that those who cause these things are up there at my level.
The culprit: poverty
So, who or what do we blame? In this case at least, the culprit can be easily
identified: poverty. The solution is also simple but difficult—and that solution is
development, development that is sustainable and equitable and just.
As it pertains to our forests here in the Philippines, sustainable development involves
the granting of tenurial rights to farmers and ancestral domain rights to indigenous
people.
For the farmers, we have an integrated social forestry program that seeks to
transform tillers of the land from shifting cultivators to forest conservationists. The
main vehicle for such a transformation is security of land tenure to not more than
seven hectares of forest land for 25 years, renewable for another 25 years. Support
services will be provided to encourage landholders to adopt profitable cropping
practices, as well as sustainable forestry and agricultural methods to conserve the
soil, water and other resources of the land.
For indigenous people, we have an ancestral land management program that assists
cultural minorities in the management, conservation and use of forest resources in
ancestral lands.
We are also encouraging our local communities and our tribal minorities to study the
possibilities of ecotourism. Ecotourism not only spreads environmental awareness
but also helps protect land and animal life by giving local people incentives to
preserve the environment. Moreover, ecotourism helps preserve not only the natural
but also the cultural heritage of the nation.
The ultimate test of sustainability
The more affluent nations must now heed Mother Earth’s anguished cry. Help the
poorer nations attain sustainable development through the protection of our
environment.
I might point out that tourism generates annual receipts of some $230 billion
worldwide, or 6 percent of total world trade. Last year, 400 million people traveled
abroad, compared with only 25 million in 1950.
Unfortunately, this booming traffic of tourists also exacts a heavy toll on nature. That
is why my Administration is promoting ecotourism—which recommends, for example,
the sanitary disposal of toilet paper so as to avoid litter, and frowns on the use of
such nonbiodegradables as plastics and Styrofoam while the person is traveling.
I am therefore pleased that a part of your conference includes the first Philippine
eco-ed tours, which will take foreign and local delegates to Mount Pinatubo, the
Mindoro uplands and the Cordillera.
I hope you will get to see, on your trip to the Cordillera, the ancient rice terraces of
the Ifugaos in Banaue. To my mind, there is no prouder symbol of indigenous
prowess or an apter testimony to a people’s harmony with nature than those
magnificent structures of agricultural engineering in the Cordillera. To this day, the
terraces endure—but, even more important, they continue to function. And isn’t this
the ultimate test of sustainability—to have survived the centuries and be of use to
future generations?
Enduring legacy
Let us be guided by the wisdom of our indigenous brothers and sisters, and
bequeath to our youth posterity and modern versions of the rice terraces in whatever
form. But let us give our young people green forests, blue seas, clear streams, clean
air and beautiful islands. So let us now start work on this enduring legacy.
I have just now certified as a priority Administration measure House Bill 3963,
entitled “An Act Providing for the Land Code of the Philippines,” which embodies
many of the policy measures I have mentioned to you this morning, as well as
certified as priority Administration measure House Bill 1925, “An Act Providing for the
Forestry Code of 1992.”
Let me reiterate the warm wishes and the goodwill of the Filipino people to all of you,
our foreign friends from both the youth sector and the indigenous communities.