Land is key to the identity, culture and earnings of Indigenous Filipinos, but a lack of deeds or true rights opens ancestral communities to outside encroachment and environmental damage.
The rights of Indigenous Filipinos to their ancestral lands are supposed to be protected by the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act of 1997.
But many Indigenous Filipinos face a long wait to win ancestral domain titles that are rightfully theirs, according to a World Bank report released this year.
The report recommended improving land title records and speeding up the process of certifying who owns ancestral land and their natural resources.
Environmental activists have also raised concerns about mining projects encroaching on collective Indigenous land, with the ecological damage they can cause.
The privately owned Tampakan Copper-Gold Project in southern Philippines, for instance, infringes on four parcels of land inhabited by the indigenous B’laan group, and environmental campaigners say the mines risk contaminating once-pristine Indigenous territory.
But Indigenous peoples are now fighting back.
On Oct. 4, they joined more than 3,000 locals in signing a petition against an extension of Tampakan’s mining contract.
Indigenous Filipinos have been threatened by both corporate and government projects, from mining to dams, agribusiness to infrastructure, according to the Legal Rights and Natural Resources Center (LRC), which campaigns for Indigenous people.
Unwelcome projects include the Kaliwa Dam - opposed by Dumagat-Remontados communities in Rizal and Quezon provinces - and the Didipio Copper-Gold Project of OceanaGold company in Nueva Vizcaya, which also faced strong Indigenous opposition.
Last year, mining expansion in the Philippines swallowed up 223,000 hectares of extra land that overlaps or lies close to Indigenous territories.
The LRC has also tied the death of 58 Indigenous Filipinos to projects that posed an environmental risk to their community or to land conflicts that erupted between developers and ancestral populations.
Environmental groups fear the government will keep promoting high-impact projects such as dams, geothermal plants and coal-fired power plants.
Instead, defenders of Indigenous rights urge the government to unravel disputes over who owns contested parcels of land and do more to tackle land grabs or the theft of natural resources.
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