Permanent Secretariat of the ACTO / Agreement of cooperation for the Amazon Region with IICA /Well-being of indigenous peoples
Permanent secretariat
The Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO), within its competences and the mandates received from its Member Countries, works to achieve its primary objectives through efforts and joint actions aiming at promoting the harmonious development of their respective Amazon territories, so that these actions produce equitable and mutually beneficial result, as well as the preservation of the environment and the conservation and rational use of the natural resources of those territories". For that purpose, medium and long term projects are implemented, always with the approval of all the 8 Member Countries.
ACTO's Permanent Secretariat recognizes and values the efforts and different actions that Member Countries are carrying out for the mobilization, attention and articulation, according to their capabilities, to combat, control and mitigate forest fires that occur in their respective Amazonian territories.
Within the framework of forest management, restoration and reforestation, among other policies, ACTO has been implementing different actions and fundraising for new projects and programs destined to develop and strengthen: the monitoring of the degradation and forest recovery; the development of early warning systems of deforestation; establishment of information channels that support decision making on measures to mitigate deforestation and forest degradation and the promotion of the leveling of the countries capacities to address the existing challenges in face of climate change. As well as planning for forest fire risk management; the zoning or mapping risk areas and vulnerability analysis of forest fires; the use of technologies for the application of early alerts; identification of the origin, frequency and extension of forest fires of the affected areas; and the strengthening of the information management at the national and regional levels as a basis for planning the prevention, control and combat of forest fires.
The work in favor of the Amazon Region, it must be emphasized, is carried out by the 8 Amazon Countries within the framework of their sovereignty and national and regional actions. ACTO's Permanent Secretariat is committed to multiplying these efforts in order to achieving greater and better effects towards the harmonious development and the preservation of the environment of the Amazon Region.
An agreement of cooperation for the Amazon Region between ACTO and IICA
The both entities join efforts and expertise with focus in projects that benefice the Amazon Region.
Brasilia, August 8, 2019 (IICA).The Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO) and Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) signed today Thursday (8/8), an agreement of cooperation to facilitate and strengthen both institutions in the area of common interest that benefice the Amazon Region.
The ACTO is an intergovernmental organization formatted by Eight Member Countries: Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela. The Treaty of Amazon Cooperation, established in 1978, seek to promote actions to favor of the development of the region and, at the same time, ensure the balance between the economic development and the environmental preservation.
The IICA, with its trajectory for nearly 80 years of support to the government in 34 countries of the America, seeks by means of this direct technical cooperation, to focus on four strategic objectives: improve the productivity and the competitive of the agricultural sector; leverage the agricultural contribution to the development of the territory and rural welfare; improve the agricultural training to mitigate and adapt to the climate change and make the best use of the natural resources and improve the contribution of the agriculture to the food security .
With this agreement, the IICA and the ACTO will be able to work jointly in training, production of research, technical publications and support and missions.
For that, it was agreed a period of three months to constitute a group of work that will formulate a plan of joint work that must include the search of innovative solutions and low cost ecologically technology that promote, between others, the sustainable management of the forest resources, an agriculture in harmony with the environment and an greater inclusion of the familiar agriculture to the development process.
The General Secretary of the ACTO, Alexandra Moreira López, ensured that from now on, will have a social that focus on actions in the protection and promotion of sustainable use of the biodiversity in the Amazon Region.
"I think, with this alliance, jointly between multilateral institutions, we can cooperate with our activities"
This is the way to resolve the regional questions and have multilateral effects", affirmed the Secretary General of the ACTO, Alexandra Moreira López.
For the representative of the IICA in Brazil, Hernán Chiriboga, the new alliance reaches to reinforce the role of institute in the promotion of the agricultural development and rural welfare.
"We have to work as a team and seek synergy. This is the only way to obtain results. We have complementarities in both institutes", stated Chiriboga.
The agreement of the signing ceremony was attended by the ambassadors and representatives of the Member Countries of the ACTO and of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Brazil.
The work meeting between the technical team of the both institutions to star the elaboration of work plan is scheduled for next week.
ACTO's contribution to the well-being of indigenous peoples
The ACTO, as an instrument of the foreign ministries of the region, is a multisectoral dialogue space for the development of public policy that must be strengthened, to increase the intensity, extent and frequency of its contributions, as it has done in an unbeatable way in Indigenous public policy.
Over the past decade, ACTO has significantly helped cooperation, collaboration, exchange and joint reflection on actions for the protection of indigenous peoples, especially in the case of peoples in voluntary isolation, who occupy millions of hectares of Amazonian forest pristine. These towns inhabit sets of polygons composed of territorial reserves, protected areas and concessions of various types that are, in practice, an effective means for the resilience of the Amazonian forest, an instrument of adaptation to climate change and a potential for development from the Amazon.
The delicate work of public policy in these matters, driven by a respectful, informed and technical intervention of the ACTO, allows a dialogue, frank, open and motivating that facilitates that the specialized state agencies advance in sharing learning and formulating protocols to address issues slopes.
Thus, the ACTO operates as a neutral and professional, informed and undistorted space of common governance that allows the construction of plans and actions to meet the challenges of the development of indigenous public policies, on issues such as territorial protection, health, traditional knowledge and many plus.
Under this approach, the Amazon States benefited from an ally that, from the region, thinks, acts and motivates shared learning and sincere dialogue, identifying what has worked best in the region and allowing the space to share these contributions to public policy.
The public policy agenda for indigenous peoples is an agenda that has usually advanced in periods of approach by governments to the issue. However, due to its nature as a rural public policy issue, for low-density populations; and, with very remote locations, it has been usually difficult to understand for many sectors of the States that operate rather in the urban context.
The issue of indigenous public policy in the Amazon region has been an international policy issue from contact with Europeans. In the nineteenth century it became a subject of Latin American public policy with the debate on the impact of international rubber trade.
During the Second World War and in the face of the loss of access to rubber in Southeast Asia, the United States of America and its allies returned to buy Amazon rubber. At that time, the Convention for the Protection of Scenic Beauties of the Western Hemisphere spoke to us about conservation of protected areas, while the legislation began to develop proposals for forest policy management, better expressed in the concepts of National Forests and National Reserves.
Unfortunately for 1947, European colonial powers proposed the creation of the Amazonian Hylea Institute for the management of the Amazon region, igniting the debate on the internationalization of the Amazon that would last for decades.
In 1979, the Amazonian countries, with the leadership of Brazil, decided to generate their own instrument of cooperation for development and proper management of Amazonian resources.
Since then, the most significant advances in indigenous public policy legislation were concentrated in 5 countries of the region, of which 2 of these countries concentrated most of the legislative group. While the other 3 countries had open processes of dialogue with indigenous peoples organizations for the generation of these policies.
Even so, the practice of effective field management was very restricted to a few cases. The ACTO provided the opportunity to bring together state agencies, support from regional cooperation, indigenous leaders and experienced specialists in various disciplines to advance public policy beyond the declarative normative space and establish it in the space of management practices, so necessary for the beneficiaries of public policies. Because the Amazon has been, is and should always be our comparative advantage for sustainable and endogenous development.
Article Carlos Antonio Martin Soria Dall'Orso, Ph. D. Specialist in environmental law and indigenous rights (Peru)