From 16-27 April 2018, the Seventeenth Session of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues is taking place under the theme: “Indigenous peoples’ collective rights to lands, territories and resources”. As this theme directly links to FAO’s mandate, FAO Director-General, José Graziano da Silva, delivered a video-message in which he stressed the need to address the extreme poverty faced by indigenous peoples worldwide to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. 

“Despite of the vastness of indigenous peoples’ cultures, spirituality and traditional knowledge, indigenous peoples have not seen respected their collective rights to their ancestral lands, territories and resources, as foreseen in the UN declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples signed in 2007” he said.  

Indeed, while much remains to be done to recognize indigenous peoples’ collective tenure rights, concrete experiences of recognition of customary rights are also in place and where portrayed at the side-event organized by FAO and Rights and Resources: “Indigenous peoples’ communal access to land: tenure rights and country experiences from Asia”.

This side-event provided an opportunity to discuss emerging issues related to collective rights to lands, successful interventions and useful instruments such as the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests (VGGT).