UNPFIP Network: Seven Global Currencies of the Indigenous Peoples

Life Sustaining Systems of Exchange and Reciprocity

An Evaluation Matrix for the Global Economy and Millennium Development

Challenging the Marketing of Global Monetary Policy

United Nations Climate Change Conference in Poznań, Poland 1-12 December 2008

The Commodification of the Future

and the

Battle for Middle Earth

They are called the market-based mechanisms under the Kyoto Protocol, and were developed as means of meeting greenhouse reduction targets by the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol now meeting in Poznań, Poland at the United Nations Climate Conference. The decision making process at the UN Climate Conference is limited to those UN member government states who are signatories of the Kyoto Protocol, with limited participation of observers and side events and exhibits by Non-Governmental Organizations involved with environmental and economic issues from around the world. The last UN Climate Conference was in Bali in 2007.

These mechanisms, established under the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, have been institutionalized under a worldwide structure of international exchange and monitoring that includes Emissions Trading, the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and Joint Implementation (JI). These three elements define the operational contractual framework that has created the global "carbon market". Directed at the primarily at the accelerated deforestation of the 'Middle Earth' belt of forests that encircle the globe along the tropics, the priority of addressing deforestation is driven by the magnitude of carbon emissions that result from the deforestation of Middle Earth, critically exacerbating the volume greenhouse gases in the atmosphere resulting from human activity.

Yet, as the Kyoto Protocol signatories move towards negotiating a post 2012 arrangement regarding the commitments described in the Protocol which will be expiring at that time, there is mounting concern that the process of clearing the path for market-based schemes such as carbon trading have hijacked the global peoples movement of climate justice, and are being driven by a strategy of the industrialized north of evading emission cuts by buying carbon credits from the indigenous territories of Middle Earth especially, while continuing on the disastrous global trajectory of over-consumption by the rich countries of the world, again predominantly in the Northern Hemisphere.

For historical clarification, it was at the World Conference Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa in 2001 that Indigenous Peoples from around the world joined with the Durban Group for Climate Justice and declared:

"We therefore commit ourselves to help build a global grassroots movement for climate justice, mobilize communities around the world and pledge our solidarity with people opposing carbon trading on the ground."

Within the framework of the so-called market based mechanisms, the issue of the REDD program (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries) was the flashpoint for the demonstration of protest by the Abya Yala Caucus of Indigenous Peoples at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in May of 2007.

In contest were two contrasting versions of the position of the Indigenous Peoples in terms of the "carbon market" mechanisms, which had been strongly criticized and denounced by the attending delegates of the Indigenous Peoples for specific violations of the right of Free, Prior and Informed Consent and the Right of Self Determination.

When these denunciations were not made part of the initial official report authored by the Permanent Forum, and instead the carbon market projects were promoted as examples of "Good Practice" the procedural facade of the Permanent Forum was revealed explicitly and the "Revolt" of the Indigenous Peoples pierced the veil of the "Carbon Offset" strategies being promoted by the World Bank and the global Corporatocracy.

The commodification of the future of the entire planet - of the sky itself, was on the line, and the Indigenous Peoples stood not in revolt but in fulfillment as guardians of the destiny of Humanity. We can do no less, as we are the guardians of the roots of Humanity as well.

And now Poznań, Poland and the United Nations Climate Conference as it is called. Officially it is COP 14/CMP 4, being the 14th session of Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP14) and the 4th meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (CMP 4).

The field of battle has shifted in scope and in tone, as the crisis of global financial systems unravels, and the blood of the so called Market Based approach to dealing with the issues of planetary climate change coagulates under the light of the critical gaze of a media connected global society. Another tipping point is reached, and a new hope awakens amid the darkening scenario of the melting of the artic tundra, species extinction, and the tragic disappearance of entire territories and human cultures due to the effects of global warming.

In fact these mechanisms are not truly "market based" but only represent the marketing of Global Monetary Policy which favors the profitability of corporations, the balance of trade among UN government states, and the financial and psychological control systems of the global regime of fiat monetary systems, whose masters of transaction are the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Left out of the costs in the process of calculating market value is the cumulative systemic impact of ecological destruction, which derives from defining economic growth, prosperity and markets in the artificially manipulated financial terms of global capitalism.

And once again, those who pay most dearly are the Peoples and Territories of the Indigenous Peoples worldwide, which is a blatant form of not only Genocide but also should be prosecuted under the Indigenous Peoples Convention on TERRACIDE: the DESTRUCTION of the Capacity of Earth to be a Mother to the Future Generations.

In this approach, never is the future of the Well Being of Humanity given a stakeholder position, much less acknowledged as the appropriate Rights Holder from whom we now only borrow for the present the blessings of the Mother Earth. Never will the future generations be a beneficiary of the Marketing of Global Monetary Policy, no matter how well camouflaged as an effective response to the very real crisis of climate change.

Beyond the financial and economic framework, the schema of the government state itself (i.e. the UN system) as a complex adaptive system of global human society has proven incompetent to respond in scale to the ecological crisis of the issue of climate change and global warming. The perspective, participation and value systems of the Indigenous Peoples present the necessary and critical global infrastructure that underlie and supercede the fragmented and self-serving strategies of the government-state "market based" model.

We are the surviving remnants of the original ecology of humanity at a planetary level.

President Evo Morales Ayma of Bolivia has proposed a direct attack on the structural causes created by our human society that are the cause of planetary climate change, initiating critical discussion on the issues. We add our voice as Nican Tlacah Izkalotekah, Indigenous Peoples of Abya Yala, to affirm that Free, Prior, and Informed Consent also applies to the formulation of a new conceptual global economic framework that integrates the Indigenous Peoples, outside the bounds of the monetary regimes of capitalism, to address the climate change issue.

The Confederation of the Nations of Indigenous Peoples of Mother Earth are called to gather our strength and stand against the oncoming tide of destruction and co-optation, holding to the ancestral principles which are the foundation of Humanity in the Four Directions: Respect, Inclusiveness, Complementarity, and Self Determination. This is the Tianquiztli of Community Ecology, where the real currencies of exchange and reciprocity continue to serve as the roots of our global future in order to nurture the sustainability of our planetary Human Development.

And so once again we offer the ancient understandings of our ecological and economic principles of well being, as Relatives to all Life on Earth: Seven Global Currencies Of the Indigenous Peoples.