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...

Asia is home to the largest number of indigenous peoples on Earth, with an estimated 260 million of a total of 370 million original inhabitants worldwide, yet Asian indigenous peoples are among the poorest of the poor, often facing denial of rights, discrimination, marginalization and loss of control over their lands and natural resources. Within this context, indigenous women are the most vulnerable facing a “triple discrimination” on the basis of their ethnicity, socio-economic condition and gender. This threefold discrimination reverberates through all aspects of their lives, limiting the contributions that they could provide to sustainable development and achieving the Zero...

Twelve indigenous and afro-descendant communicators from Mexico and Nicaragua reported live from Mexico City on the issues discussed during the High-Level Forum: Empower indigenous women to eradicate hunger and malnutrition in Latin America and the Caribbean. At the Forum, whose objective was to develop recommendations for public policies that promote gender equality and the rights of indigenous women, the communicators organized panel discussions, interviews and press releases to keep the indigenous women's organizations in the region informed.  These communicators are articulated around the News Agency of Indigenous and Afro-descendant Women (NOTIMIA), a network that seeks to make visible the...

On January 12 and 13 during the celebration of the High Level Forum Empowering indigenous women to eradicate hunger and malnutrition in Latin America and the Caribbean, FAO launched the advocacy campaign "Make them visible, empower them". This campaign seeks to increase the empowerment of indigenous women through the recognition of their contributions and challenges to the achievement of Zero Hunger and the whole Sustainable Development Agenda. "Indigenous women have fundamental roles in the spiritual, social and family arenas and are seed guardians - critical carriers of specialized knowledge," said FAO Director General José Graziano da Silva during the...

On the occasion of the 44th Session of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS), FAO and its partners organized the side event “An intergenerational knowledge exchange: indigenous forest management and food security in the context of climate change - Indigenous youth and elders present mechanisms for sustainable forestry and climate change adaptation”.  The side event was organized in partnership with the Government of Norway and  the Government of Panama, the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII), the Fund for the Development of Indigenous Peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean (FILAC), the Global Indigenous Youth Caucus (GIYC),...