A group of twelve Development and Peace members from the Prairies and the Atlantic provinces, accompanied by two staff members, are on a solidarity trip to the Philippines.
Lawrence Townley-Smith, Member of Development and Peace
A group of 12 Development and Peace members from the Prairies and the Atlantic provinces, accompanied by two staff members, are on a solidarity trip to the Philippines.
Over thirty people have crammed into a small wooden hut surrounded by mountains and rice paddies in the village of Bayog. Inside, a lively debate is raging.
“When the company put the monuments to demarcate the land of the mine, some of our land was included inside, but we don’t want our lands to be inside,” states someone in the hut.
Timuay Boy Anoy, a tribal leader of the indigenous Subanens of the Philippines, knows all too well the conflicts that come with a mine. When the Filipino Government handed over Subanen ancestral lands as a concession to a Canadian mining company, the community quickly dissolved into factions of those in favour of the mine and those opposed. Rumours, resistance, manipulation and a lack of transparency began to pull apart the social fabric of the tribe.
In Honduras’ mountainous southern department of La Paz, mornings are chilly and the altitude is ideal for coffee growing. Here, the dark-skinned indigenous Lenca people make up 80% of the population. Yet, from the poverty and the discrimination they endure, one might think they were a minority.
In this community, four out of ten children die before they reach the age of two from a poverty-related disease. Most of the girls become pregnant while still minors, and in the community of Santa Elena alone, eleven women died last year in childbirth.
Development and Peace partner NGO Forum in Cambodia is working to defend the land rights of Indigenous communities in the country. They recently released a report entitled "Free, Prior and Informed Consent in Development" that shows how communities are not being consulted when land deals are being made between the government and private companies.
