The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization International bioethics Committee (IBC) had asked more than 100 specialized research institutes throughout the world to answer questions intended to secure information about traditional medical practices, their institutional framework and legal regulation. The IBC also called upon traditional health practitioners from different regions of the world to participate in discussions presenting their points of view and experience with traditional medicine.  Absent an understanding of ancient knowledge systems, their structures and how they work, and relying on only what can be called a cursory and largely superficial consideration of the present state of existing scholarly understanding about ancient knowledge, the International Bioethics Committee of UNESCO may now only draw one conclusion:

1) Seventy percent to 90% of the peoples living in developing countries and perhaps 40% to 60% of the citizens living in so called developed countries rely on traditional medicines and healing practices  as a primary source of health care or in the case of developed countries as a frequent source of health care.

2.) In many countries there are more traditional healers than there are conventional medical practitioners,

3) The effectiveness and benefits of traditional medicines and healing practices are not measured or understood by conventional medical systems,

4) Users of traditional medicines and healing appear to benefit from treatments for mental disorders, chronic health conditions including rheumatism, metabolic disorders, neurological anomalies and conditions including diabetes, heart disease, arthritis and obesity, abdominal pains, diarrhea, jaundice and malaria.

Concerned that traditional medicine may forestall access to “modern medicine” the IBC suggests that “cultural familiarity” cannot be used to obstruct such access. In reality, like the World Health Organization that also seeks to classify traditional medicines and healing practices and argues that such practices “should be respected, preserved, promoted and communicated widely and appropriated based on the circumstances in each country” (Beijing Declaration), the argument is that states’ governments should “ensure appropriate, safe and effective use of traditional medicine” under state laws and standards.

The problem with the IBC approach and ultimately that of the World Health Organization is that they conclude that states’ governments should assume regulatory control over traditional medicine and healing practices when UNESCO, the WHO or states’ governments do not understand, have no means to understand or seems unwilling to understand the ancient knowledge systems that are foundational to traditional medicines and healing practices anywhere in the world.  How can a State respect, preserve, promote and communicate traditional medicines and healing practices about which they understand virtually nothing?

The ultimate violation of ethical practice would seem to be inherent in the UNESCO, WHO and states’ government approach to relegating traditional medicine and healing practices to a “precious resource” that is only useful if it is placed under the guiding hand of “modern medicine” so such practices can be clarified. This approach, of course, ignores the infancy of “modern medicine” and the confounding errors of modern medicine–witness the inability to heal and prevent chronic disease-representing 80% of human illness. Achieving the “highest attainable standard of health” so urgently and earnestly sought by the International Bioethics Committee might well be best achieved by first seeking to understand the structures of ancient knowledge systems on which traditional medicine and healing practices are based before urging state institutional control over the very thing it does not understand.

Discussions of traditional knowledge in the international arena and in academic institutions have only begun to scratch the surface of understanding the structures of ancient knowledge systems. The systems of knowledge provide not only health and healing (and has been done so for thousands of years), but created the very basis for civilization: architecture, water engineering, agronomy, astrophysics, quantum physics, the hugely fragmented sciences, social order, political organizations, mathematics, music and the arts, and much more.

A good prescription for the International Bioethics Committee would be to directly engage indigenous scholars around the world who individually and collectively contribute to defining the fabric of ancient knowledge on which communities and civilizations base their traditional medicines and healing practices.  Perhaps the best model for proceeding is to consider the examples of Ghana, Tibet, the Diné, the Mayan DayKeepers, Mapuché healers and support a sustained effort to have these and thousands of other indigenous peoples explain the structures and elements of the ancient systems of knowledge on which they base their medicinal and healing practices.

At the moment, UNESCO, IBC, the WHO, states governments and academic institutions interested in benefiting from ancient knowledge act as if they are “one hand clapping.”  To make a full and effective sound they must work with indigenous peoples, their scholars and their practitioners in a concerted effort as collaborators–not controllers. Now, that would be ethical.

  Dr. Mirjam Hirch, Darmstadt, Germany

Not satisfied with these accomplishments Mirjam has added another achievement: She has earned her doctorate and is now Dr. Mirjam Hirch.

We at the Center for World Indigenous Studies are very proud of Dr. Hirch’s accomplishment and offer our very best congratulations.  The world has in Mirjam a powerful voice for the benefit of traditional medicine and for indigenous peoples. Thank you Dr. Mirjam Hirch!

Technorati Tags: Mirjam Hirch, doctorate, Dr. Mirjam Hirch, traditional medicine

What is now called “permaculture,” but I think of as “earth gardening,” is a system of thought and practice developed by Australian ecologists Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in the 1970s that attempts to mirror the interactive food producing relationship between indigenous peoples and their environment.  While it is not equivalent, permaculture can serve as metropolitan society’s best understanding of direct human-environment living balance. The successful bi-directional interdependence between human-beings and the natural environment varies in form and practice among indigenous nations around the world. The differences between nations constitutes the variety of human/environment adaptions to micro-climates and environments.  This organically evolved approach to diverse adaptions can be clearly recognized as the main success for all of human survival.

Despite the considerable benefit to human survival achieved through a balance between human want and nature’s capacity to reproduce more direct efforts to control nature (such as row cropping, pesticides, irrigation, transplantation and since the 1990s the use of genetic modification) methods for expanding the production of food for biological and commercial benefit introduced a radical alteration and basic reductions in the quality of food and nutrition.

Foods (animal and plant) produced as a direct consequence of natural interactions between plants, animals, and climate contain vastly more nutritional benefits for human beings than commercially produced foods. Simple nutritional comparisons between plants and animals in the “wild” their domesticated (commercial) equivalents reveal how sharply reduced are the nutritional values in commercial foods.

Chronic disease is rapidly consuming the global health budget where 80% of all health problems are chronic conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, cancers, arthritis, allergies and autoimmune disease. Before the advent of “modern agriculture” (read: industrialized agriculture) such chronic conditions were a very small part of the human health profile.

The introduction of genetically modified organisms (GMO) now promises to accelerate the slow death syndrome where instead of quick death produced by physical traumas, or bacterial or viral infection chronic disease slowly kills its host by promoting attacks on the body by the body itself.

Human introduced disease by way of industrial food production and GMO promise to increase the pace of chronic disease throughout the world.  In other words, commercial exploitation of human requirements for food has had and will continue to have a disastrous effect on human nutrition and human health. Human beings are killing people all around the world under the guise of “increasing food for everyone.”

Governments and businesses  have joined hands to produce a huge wave of nutritional trauma (nutritional deficiencies) or malnutrition in populations dependent on cash/food relationship. Slowly, industrial food production and GMO have moved into indigenous populations through small stores.  Instead of a people/environment/food that has long sustained human populations, indigenous peoples are themselves being moved into a cash/food relationship.  The result is that chronic disease is increasingly ravaging indigenous nations around the world–particularly in countries like the United States of America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, France, and Spain.

Just as petroleum dependency fouls the human nest with spills, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and toxins in the food and water so will industrial/GMO food production foul the human nest by undermining the health of hundreds of millions of people, increase nutritional trauma and place more people on the slow death track of chronic disease.

Indigenous nations must know that their age-old systems of food production and the evolved adaptation of these systems to respond to climate and environmental changes are the systems on which all of humanity will have to turn if the current “new” systems fail. There is no doubt that these new systems will fail.  When compared with the thousands of years humans have successfully engaged in “earth gardening” the current food production systems pail. Quantity for quality has been the exchange since the advent of industrial and GMO for production. Much more food with less or little nutritional value, but substantially more harmful content to the human body may be a commercial success, but it is a failure for human health and human survival.

Technorati Tags: Genetically Modified Organisms, GMO, natural foods, wild foods, indigenoous nations, agriculture, permaculture, industrial food production, chronic disease, nutritional trauma, earth gardening

The International Programme on the State of the Ocean joined with the International Union for Conservation of Nature and the World Commission on protected Areas just released their report on the condition of global oceans.  Their conclusions are not good…, but then it should not be a surprise that the oceans are rapidly falling into disrepair.

Indigenous peoples the world over have long expressed grave concern about the declining health of the world’s oceans just as they have been early to recognize the decline of forests, deserts, savannahs, ice flows, and arctic regions.  Long before these reports of environmental degradation indigenous peoples have been sounding alarms.

The breakdown of terrestrial environments by commercial exploitation and the constant release of poisons and toxins by “developing” as well as “developed” economies is matched by the flow of human generated poisons into streams, rivers and ultimately the ocean.  When a plastic bottle and solid waste island the size of Texas floats in the Pacific Ocean due to soda and water sales, one must immediately recognize that human waste is a huge problem that is destroying the collective human nest.  Life cannot be sustained as long as human waste, toxins and poisons remain uncontrolled.

A solution? Increase taxes on packaging, pesticides, herbicides, pharmaceuticals, paints, chemicals and the like. There is the claim that such taxes will reduce economic output.  In all probability that will be true, but saving profits for commercial pocket books seems a stupid option when those profits fail to contribute to reduced poising of the oceans and thus ensure life.

Indigenous peoples have long sounded the alarm in such places as the river delta of southern Nigeria where oil companies poison the water and terrestrial environment with their criminal and constant leakage of petroleum into the environment.  Large mining operations in southern Papua New Guinea dump enormous quantities poisons onto the land and into the ocean. Industrial farms release animal waste into streams and the oceans without accountability. Cities too large to manage like Tokyo, New York, Moscow, Mexico City, Bejing, Sidney and Lagos dump enormous amounts of human waste and commerical waste into the water ways to ultimately foul the oceans.

None of this is essential to human life.  Indigenous peoples see life of all things as essential. How will we live if all is poisoned?Technorati Tags: Oceans, indigenous peoples, environmental toxins, International Programme on the State of the Ocean, IPSO, International Union for Conservation of Nature, IUCN, World Commission on Protected Areas

Indigenous peoples in Thailand, the Congo, India, Canada, the United States, Australia and nearly every country in the world are caught up in this despicable trade in human flesh.  The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women in the Asia Pacific (CATW-AP) is doing something about reversing the terrible violence committed against women and against children. This group sponsored an important meeting in India calling attention to the sexual violence being committed against the indigenous peoples.

In the conference declaration they joined in affirming:

We unite with our sisters in the feminist movement and the labor movement who call for real jobs, not prostitution; for economic programs that create local, sustainable employment, and not push women out of the country; for the socialization of the care economy while recognizing that domestic work is work; for greater budget for women and away from military expenditures.

We unite with the Dalits, aborigines and indigenous peoples’ movements in the region who decry the targeting of our communities for sex trafficking and prostitution.

(Statement of Asia-Pacific Meeting of Sex Trafficking and Prostitution Survivors)

The Declaration goes on to point the finger at government that criminalizes and stigmatizes those exploited in prostitution and calls on authorities to reverse this type of behavior.

The message given at the conference is that trafficking in sex must stop. Official acceptance of prostitution must stop.  For indigenous peoples it is essential that their mistreatment and exploitation become recognized and understood…and most of all — ENDED.

The Declaration makes clear where and how this scourge survives:

Prostitution thrives because of the false ideas that women are inferior, sexual objects and commodities while men are superior, the sole decision-makers and owners of properties.  Many of us have been victimized in child marriage, incestuous rape, different forms of child abuse, and domestic violence before we were victimized in prostitution.  The system thrives because economic disparity widens between the rich and the poor.  Because state policies continue to compromise our countries to sex tourists, foreign and local military, and big business, at the expense of our women’s livelihoods and bodily integrity.  These are the workings of patriarchal, militarist and neo-liberal economic policies.

Dr. Melissa Farley, President and lead researcher for Prostitution Research and Education in California, USA and CWIS Associate Scholar persuasively demonstrates that prostitution and all forms of sex trafficking constitute a form of organized violence against women generally and against indigenous women in countries around the world. Her work is essential to improving public awareness and understanding of sex trafficking and prostitution and violence in society.

Crime against the most vulnerable is despicable. Crime against women, against indigenous women, is inexcusable.  It must be punished and eradicated.

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Five factors, according to the World Food Program serve as the main causes of hunger–the consequence of Food Insecurity: Climate Change, Violent Conflicts, lack of financial and material wealth, uneven distribution of infrastructure (lack of roads, warehouses, irrigation resulting in high transportation costs, lack of storage facilities and unreliable water supplies) and environmental breakdown due to deforestation, overcropping, erosion, salination and desertification.

I suggest there are still other factors contributing to growing food insecurity: concentration of economic control over food production, and displacement of peoples from small, productive lands, forests and jungles where they produce their own food.

Food production is increasingly in the hands of major corporations selectively narrowing the global food base. More productive land is falling under the control of massive business organizations. Individual family food production is declining world-wide as people are forced off their land or away from productive sources of food.

Evidence of the folly this approach to food production represents can be found in the globally rising food prices resulting from crop failures in grain exporting countries. Total global grain production declined by more than 2.7% from the 2008-2009 to 2010-2011 period. Wheat production is down by more than 5.5% in that period. Owing to an unprecedented heat wave in Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan wheat production precipitously dropped and prices rose–beyond the capacity of people to pay.  The same problem occurred affecting rice prices.

When people are no longer able to either produce or purchase food in large measure due to the five major causes of hunger plus corporate control over more food producing land, the cost of food rises and food becomes inaccessible–the number of people hungry and dying increases worldwide.

A major adjustment needed in the world food production system is to localize more food production by returning land to peoples whose land was “legally” taken (e.g., Brazil, Mexico, Botswana), or confiscated under government control (Zimbabwe) or lands stolen outright as in the case of Darfur in the Sudan. Governments should sponsor rural development programs to support local food production from agriculture to permaculture and wildcrafting.

Life must be the principle motive for food production, not profits.  Governments must step back from the drive to increase the “bottom line” of corporations so as to claim successful economic development, and step forward to promote community and family food production on lands restored and protected. Where climate change, violence and economic poverty undermine food production governments must seek out best practices in traditional knowledge and conventional sciences to support effective adaptation.  If a population must be relocated it must be done with free, prior and informed consent well in advance of the impending adverse affects on food production.

Food security is a necessity for life. Communities and countries have an obligation to focus greater attention on this growing challenge to human security. Changes in the global food system and the economics of food must be changed to diversify food production among peoples throughout the world instead of narrowing access by promoting a global food trade system that is more susceptible to the affects of the five causes of hunger. While droughts, for example may cause some small food producers to suffer in one region, such an event would not undermine food production in other parts of the world. Diversity is essential with food being produced locally by more individuals and communities.

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I realize this sounds hysterical, but the products these businesses make with the help of conventional scientists and sell directly and indirectly into the human food chain have spread far beyond the laboratories. The introduction of genetically modified foods (GMOs) and genetically engineered (GE) pesticides and herbicides as well as animals are causing greater direct damage to human food security, the ability of the earth to naturally regenerate in the soils and atmosphere and in the waters of rivers, streams and springs. Chemicals that destroy life are being dumped into the unregulated market of countries around the world (particularly 2nd, 3rd and 4th world) countries and increasingly in regulated markets such as the European Union, Canada and the United States, Australia and Japan.

The United States government’s penchant to throw caution to the wind and allow businesses to produce life threatening contaminants into the atmosphere, waterways, soils and food is legion.  This country is the source of growing contamination of soils, crops and animals from GMO and GE products resulting in not only increasing unexplained illnesses, environmental degradation and business dependent crops, but the indigenous seeds of plants and stocks of animals used by indigenous peoples to produce food in small eco-niches around the world are losing their food security to giant, unseen businesses.

In México’s indigenous territories, thought to be quite remote from corporate farms using GMO seeds, the diversity of the more than 65 indigenous varieties of maize are now threatened with contamination.  Developed over several millennia as a result of the cultural relationship between generations of Maya and Nahuatl peoples, the land and the maize itself these many varieties have sustain peoples faced with drought, high heat and strong winds–changing climates–and they continue today.  In other words, the culturally sustainable process of human and plant relationships have produced replantable seeds that are the foundation of life in Mexico.  These seeds are also the original genetic stock from which corn throughout the world has been developed.

But experts say Mexico’s native varieties are themselves under peril —
from economics and genetic contamination — potentially depriving humans
of a crucial resource.

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This circumstance also leaves the states in the position of defining the rules, regulations and standards for climate change mitigation and adaption.

Finally, this puts the Climate Change Treaty Negotiations to meet in Cancun, Mexico this December in a shambles…much the same as in Copenhagen last year.

The failure of the United States of America to responsibly advance constructive climate mitigation and adaption strategies is a major problem for the US, indigenous peoples and the international community. Corporate and other narrow interests have utterly compromised the US position.  Power companies, coal mine operations, oil companies, automobile companies, and even industrial farms are all part of the mosaic of interests undermining the political will to effectively address the adverse affects of climate change. Parochial interests combined with global energy have completely undermine the ability of the US government to act.  Political dysfunction is rapidly driving the decision-making process into the mud.

Indigenous peoples are, in this observer’s view, at greater risk now than ever before.  Indigenous peoples must take the initiative to set new rules, regulations and their own cultural standards for ecosystems where they reside.  Instead of depending on the states’ government authorities and organization to formulate favorable policies they must preempt the international community and the local state authorities or they will be overwhelmed by corporate driven policies that will further impose havoc in indigenous territories.  As this view suggests, failure to initiate effective responses to the adverse affects of climate change in indigenous territories by indigenous communities threatens all populations.  The onus is on indigenous leaders to initiate their own authority where climate change mitigation and adaptation has the greatest effect: the local ecosystem.

I hear everyone say, “We need money!” I don’t deny that, but the will to act must precede the money.  If there is no will, then there is no action.

The most troubling, and not unexpected, circumstance in the US Senate is that there is a majority (Republican and Democratic) of senators protecting energy, power, and development corporate interests.  Instead of identifying alternatives to sustain economies, the general tendency is to simply maintain the status quo.

This attitude prevails in virtually all industrialized states in the world.  Consequently, there is no willingness to negotiate alternative strategies for mitigating and adapting to the adverse affects of climate change.

Indigenous peoples have virtually no allies in states’ government legislative or administrative bodies. Failure to recognize this fact will cause serious problems for indigenous peoples’ cultures, economies and social environment in the months and years to come.

Taking independent action to protect and care for indigenous territories and communities must now be seen as essential.  Coalitions of indigenous nations should be considered to work together in similar environmental niches. Indigenous organizations must turn their attention to the midterm and long term continuity of indigenous communities and give their significant resource support to indigenous community decision-making, informing indigenous publics and supporting local regulatory, and cultural standard setting for climate mitigation and adaptation.

All of this is not to say that indigenous nations should now ignore regional, country-wide and international actions on climate change.  Indeed, it is more important now that these arenas receive attention.  Monitor and stay informed while taking independent action. The sustained existence of indigenous communities in the US and world-wide depends on indigenous peoples exercising the will to develop their own strategies for adapting to the changing climate.

climate change, indigenous peoples, US Senate, Senator Harry Reid, mitigation, adaptation, US Environmental Protection Agency, UN Climate Change Negotiations, Cancun

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