Economic and Social Council: Press Conference

Everyday people — from a Japanese oyster fisherman cultivating his business by planting trees in an estuary devastated by the 2011 tsunami, to two Michigan teenagers campaigning to ensure Girl Scout cookies and other palm oil-based products were deforestation-free — were among the panellists sharing their grass-roots approaches to forest preservation at a Headquarters press conference today.

With major global meetings on the horizon, members of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues said today that ensuring the “full, meaningful and equal” participation of indigenous representatives had taken on a truly paramount importance. Speaking at a Headquarters press conference to mark the end of the Forum’s tenth session, members of the Forum said indigenous participation in decision-making processes had been an overarching theme during the session.

As output growth remained feeble in the developed world, robustly growing emerging economies in Asia and Latin America would continue to drive global economic recovery for the rest of the year and during 2012, United Nations economists said this afternoon during a Headquarters news conference.

At a Headquarters press conference today, human rights activists urged the United Nations to play a greater role in pushing for implementation of the 1997 Chittagong Hill Tracts Peace Accord in Bangladesh, which was intended to protect the rights of the area’s indigenous peoples.

Bedouin Palestinian refugees living in the West Bank were in dire need of access to their traditional natural resources — rangeland and water — as well as basic health and education services, denied to them since their forcible displacement from the Negev Desert in 1948, community representative Mohamed Al Korshan said at a Headquarters press conference today.

Indigenous peoples must be consulted — and their right to free, prior and informed consent respected — if the target of halving the proportion of people lacking access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation was to be reached by 2015, in line with the Millennium Development Goals, members of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues said at a Headquarters press conference today.

Using $1.5 million in start-up funds supplied by the Government of Denmark, the United Nations Indigenous Partnership (UNIPP) would work at the country level to promote dialogue and build partnerships, Raja Devashish Roy, a member of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, said at Headquarters today.

While some strides had been made by the international community in protecting the basic human rights of indigenous peoples, significant breaches of those rights still existed around the world, said prominent indigenous representatives at a Headquarters press conference today.

Governments, multinational corporations and the banks supporting them financially must respect international environmental standards in their extraction of natural resources or construction of giant infrastructure projects in biologically diverse lands, members of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues said at a Headquarters press conference today.

The tenth session of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues would give delegates an opportunity to review more than 200 recommendations made over the last decade in discussing such issues as the role of indigenous peoples in the sustainable development debate, Forum Chair Mirna Cunningham said at a Headquarters press conference today.