In the ejido (communal landholding) of Pichucalco, Montes Azules Biosphere, in the Lacandon Rainforest, delegates from the Montes Azules REDDeldía (“REDDellion”) Movement gathered from April 8 to 10 to discuss the issue of the inclusion of biodiversity and the traditional knowledge of indigenous peoples in the draft multinational free trade agreement known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
The movement established three objectives:
1. To denounce the wave of privatization of the world’s biodiversity.
2. To do something to stop it and to build a peoples’ alternative.
3. To offer a new flank of resistance in the general struggle of the peoples to provide support to other struggles and encouragement to those who, for the moment, have lost the battle against the structural reforms that have impacted them.
The delegates agreed on a Defence Plan, which includes the denunciation of the threats faced; calling on communities to resist against official and foreign programmes for conservation, land privatization and research on the forests and knowledge of the peoples; the creation of a global site to denounce the plans, strategies and actions aimed at plundering the forests and traditional knowledge and a worldwide campaign to alert consumers; the promotion of global solidarity-based distribution of biodiversity and traditional knowledge; the promotion of the organization of regional peoples’ collection and storage centres; and opposition to the “Brecha Lacandona” territorial demarcation.
They also developed a Work Plan of alternatives that include promoting, with support independent from the government and persons or groups that serve it, “the recovery of our traditional knowledge and practices and also of our own histories, to be stored in archives under the control of the communities themselves or of organizations or persons of proven trust”; promoting the community use and management of biodiversity, “primarily for the satisfaction of our health and food needs”; and developing community biodiversity management plans.
The full declaration is available at http://reddeldia.blogspot.mx/
