Social Europe

politics, economy and employment & labour

  • Themes
    • Strategic autonomy
    • War in Ukraine
    • European digital sphere
    • Recovery and resilience
  • Publications
    • Books
    • Dossiers
    • Occasional Papers
    • Research Essays
    • Brexit Paper Series
  • Podcast
  • Videos
  • Newsletter

Deforestation an attack on the human rights of forest peoples

Hipólito Acevei and Gam A Shimray 1st November 2021

The European Commission must recognise deforestation is not only about the environment but human rights, especially for indigenous peoples. 

indigenous peoples,deforestation
Negotiating the Ecuadorian Amazon—indigenous peoples’ knowledge can be a factor in maintaining biodiversity (Ammit Jack / shutterstock.com)

The destruction of the world’s forests for industrial agriculture—whether clearing land in south America to feed international soy, beef and leather markets, destroying Indonesia’s forests for palm oil or razing forests in west Africa to plant cocoa—is rightly gaining attention around the world. Europe is the second biggest importer of agricultural goods linked to deforestation and the European Commission is preparing a regulation that would prevent such products gaining entry to the European market. Yet the commission’s solution addresses only half the problem.

The proposed regulation fails to recognise that forests are not just an ecosystem: they are also home to millions of forest peoples. For indigenous peoples, the destruction of forests is explicitly linked to human-rights violations. These include dispossession of our customary lands and resources, threats and violence, as well as loss of access to food, clean water and our traditional medicines, destruction of our culture and spirituality and devaluation of our right to self-determination—and the cultural, spiritual and material impoverishment these violations entail.

We are not only however the most affected by deforestation—we are also the best at stopping it. Our knowledge, culture, spirituality and history of taking care of our lands and forests is recognised by policy-makers and scientists around the world as one of the most effective ways of keeping forests standing and maintaining biodiversity in good health. Our local, independent information is also essential for understanding what is really happening in remote areas of the forest frontier. As a result, the best—as well as cost-effective—way to protect forests is to respect and protect indigenous peoples’ customary tenure rights, grounded in indigenous knowledge.

Not enough

Yet despite this evidence, the commission’s regulatory proposal on deforestation would not require that access for products to the single market be conditional on respect for our internationally recognised human rights. Such products would have to comply with country-of-origin laws but that’s not enough: in most forest countries, our human rights are not actually protected by national laws and they are even less respected in practice.


Our job is keeping you informed!


Subscribe to our free newsletter and stay up to date with the latest Social Europe content. We will never send you spam and you can unsubscribe anytime.

Sign up here

Failure to include human rights in the draft regulation creates unnecessary risks for us and for our forests. It would incentivise companies to appropriate areas under existing cultivation by communities to avoid new deforestation—causing harms to people and indirect leakage of deforestation to new areas. It would fail to tackle land allocation and tenure, underlying issues that drive deforestation across the tropical forest belt, increasing the chance that supply chains would simply shift between countries to accommodate EU requirements without any change on the ground. And it would be inconsistent with the EU’s commitments to respect and promote human rights, including the rights of indigenous peoples.

It is not too late for the commission to shift course. On October 20th the chair of the European Parliament’s environment committee and its rapporteur on deforestation wrote to key commissioners, urging them to ‘make this law for nature and for people … by making free, prior and informed consent to use and convert land a pre-condition for forest- and ecosystem-risk commodities to enter the EU market’.

Integrated approach

What is needed now—and urgently—is a truly integrated environmental and human rights approach that protects, respects and secures our collective land and territorial rights as indigenous peoples, which could signal a new era around the world. The EU must also ensure its actions in other areas, such as trade, are coherent with this approach: for example, it should not ratify the Mercosur agreement unless and until adequate protections for human rights and the environment are included.

Last month, more than 160 civil-society organisations and academics from around the world sent an open letter to global leaders, calling on them to integrate human rights in environment and climate policy. The EU must heed this call, and recognise and protect what indigenous peoples have long known: people and the environment are not separate but all part of the same Mother Earth. And there is no better way to protect the forest than to protect the rights of the traditional owners and guardians of it.

indigenous peoples,deforestation
Hipólito Acevei

Hipólito Acevei is president of the Federation for the Self Determination of Indigenous Peoples, made up of 12 organisations of indigenous peoples of Paraguay.

Gam A Shimray
Gam A Shimray

Gam A Shimray is secretary general of the Asian Indigenous Peoples Pact, a regional organisation, headquartered in Thailand, founded in 1992 by indigenous peoples’ movements. AIPP has 46 members from 14 countries in Asia, with 18 indigenous peoples’ national alliances/networks (national formations) and 30 local and subnational organisations.

You are here: Home / Ecology / Deforestation an attack on the human rights of forest peoples

Most Popular Posts

Visentini,ITUC,Qatar,Fight Impunity,50,000 Visentini, ‘Fight Impunity’, the ITUC and QatarFrank Hoffer
Russian soldiers' mothers,war,Ukraine The Ukraine war and Russian soldiers’ mothersJennifer Mathers and Natasha Danilova
IGU,documents,International Gas Union,lobby,lobbying,sustainable finance taxonomy,green gas,EU,COP ‘Gaslighting’ Europe on fossil fuelsFaye Holder
Schengen,Fortress Europe,Romania,Bulgaria Romania and Bulgaria stuck in EU’s second tierMagdalena Ulceluse
income inequality,inequality,Gini,1 per cent,elephant chart,elephant Global income inequality: time to revise the elephantBranko Milanovic

Most Recent Posts

transition,deindustrialisation,degradation,environment Europe’s industry and the ecological transitionCharlotte Bez and Lorenzo Feltrin
central and eastern Europe,unions,recognition Social dialogue in central and eastern EuropeMartin Myant
women soldiers,Ukraine Ukraine war: attitudes changing to women soldiersJennifer Mathers and Anna Kvit
military secrets,World Trade Organization,WTO,NATO,intellectual-property rights Military secrets and the World Trade OrganizationUgo Pagano
energy transition,Europe,wind and solar Europe’s energy transition starts to speed upDave Jones

Other Social Europe Publications

front cover scaled Towards a social-democratic century?
Cover e1655225066994 National recovery and resilience plans
Untitled design The transatlantic relationship
Women Corona e1631700896969 500 Women and the coronavirus crisis
sere12 1 RE No. 12: Why No Economic Democracy in Sweden?

Hans Böckler Stiftung Advertisement

The macroeconomic effects of re-applying the EU fiscal rules

Against the background of the European Commission's reform plans for the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), this policy brief uses the macroeconometric multi-country model NiGEM to simulate the macroeconomic implications of the most relevant reform options from 2024 onwards. Next to a return to the existing and unreformed rules, the most prominent options include an expenditure rule linked to a debt anchor.

Our results for the euro area and its four biggest economies—France, Italy, Germany and Spain—indicate that returning to the rules of the SGP would lead to severe cuts in public spending, particularly if the SGP rules were interpreted as in the past. A more flexible interpretation would only somewhat ease the fiscal-adjustment burden. An expenditure rule along the lines of the European Fiscal Board would, however, not necessarily alleviate that burden in and of itself.

Our simulations show great care must be taken to specify the expenditure rule, such that fiscal consolidation is achieved in a growth-friendly way. Raising the debt ceiling to 90 per cent of gross domestic product and applying less demanding fiscal adjustments, as proposed by the IMK, would go a long way.


DOWNLOAD HERE

ILO advertisement

Global Wage Report 2022-23: The impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power

The International Labour Organization's Global Wage Report is a key reference on wages and wage inequality for the academic community and policy-makers around the world.

This eighth edition of the report, The Impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power, examines the evolution of real wages, giving a unique picture of wage trends globally and by region. The report includes evidence on how wages have evolved through the COVID-19 crisis as well as how the current inflationary context is biting into real wage growth in most regions of the world. The report shows that for the first time in the 21st century real wage growth has fallen to negative values while, at the same time, the gap between real productivity growth and real wage growth continues to widen.

The report analysis the evolution of the real total wage bill from 2019 to 2022 to show how its different components—employment, nominal wages and inflation—have changed during the COVID-19 crisis and, more recently, during the cost-of-living crisis. The decomposition of the total wage bill, and its evolution, is shown for all wage employees and distinguishes between women and men. The report also looks at changes in wage inequality and the gender pay gap to reveal how COVID-19 may have contributed to increasing income inequality in different regions of the world. Together, the empirical evidence in the report becomes the backbone of a policy discussion that could play a key role in a human-centred recovery from the different ongoing crises.


DOWNLOAD HERE

ETUI advertisement

Social policy in the European Union: state of play 2022

Since 2000, the annual Bilan social volume has been analysing the state of play of social policy in the European Union during the preceding year, the better to forecast developments in the new one. Co-produced by the European Social Observatory (OSE) and the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI), the new edition is no exception. In the context of multiple crises, the authors find that social policies gained in ambition in 2022. At the same time, the new EU economic framework, expected for 2023, should be made compatible with achieving the EU’s social and ‘green’ objectives. Finally, they raise the question whether the EU Social Imbalances Procedure and Open Strategic Autonomy paradigm could provide windows of opportunity to sustain the EU’s social ambition in the long run.


DOWNLOAD HERE

Eurofound advertisement

Eurofound webinar: Making telework work for everyone

Since 2020 more European workers and managers have enjoyed greater flexibility and autonomy in work and are reporting their preference for hybrid working. Also driven by technological developments and structural changes in employment, organisations are now integrating telework more permanently into their workplace.

To reflect on these shifts, on 6 December Eurofound researchers Oscar Vargas and John Hurley explored the challenges and opportunities of the surge in telework, as well as the overall growth of telework and teleworkable jobs in the EU and what this means for workers, managers, companies and policymakers.


WATCH THE WEBINAR HERE

Foundation for European Progressive Studies Advertisement

Discover the new FEPS Progressive Yearbook and what 2023 has in store for us!

The Progressive Yearbook focuses on transversal European issues that have left a mark on 2022, delivering insightful future-oriented analysis for the new year. It counts on renowned authors' contributions, including academics, politicians and analysts. This fourth edition is published in a time of war and, therefore, it mostly looks at the conflict itself, the actors involved and the implications for Europe.


DOWNLOAD HERE

About Social Europe

Our Mission

Article Submission

Membership

Advertisements

Legal Disclosure

Privacy Policy

Copyright

Social Europe ISSN 2628-7641

Social Europe Archives

Search Social Europe

Themes Archive

Politics Archive

Economy Archive

Society Archive

Ecology Archive

Follow us

RSS Feed

Follow us on Facebook

Follow us on Twitter

Follow us on LinkedIn

Follow us on YouTube