Honoring Indigenous Wisdom: Peru's Multicultural Agenda for Inclusive Growth at APEC
"We stand behind the urgent need to raise awareness about the importance of engaging Indigenous peoples in global trade and providing them with the tools to fully harness the benefits of globalization."
Peru is a diverse nation that gathers multiple ethnicities, beliefs and cultures; is home to 55 Indigenous groups who can trace their origins to ancestral times before the modern state, and, thus, preserve their own institutions and way of living within the limits of the law.
Likewise, many of them speak in their languages and profess their unique visions of the world. Of these 55 groups (that amount to the 25 percent of our population), four are found in the Andean highlands, and 51 make the Amazon forest their home—many of whom live in extensive areas that surpass our borders.
As a multicultural society, we highly value the unique perspective and traditional wisdom that Indigenous peoples bring to the discussions of common problems and the public policies needed to address them in a timely manner.
Our contemporary view on this reality is rooted in respect for interculturalism. These ancient cultures, with their collective rights, hold great significance. They possess intricate social structures, kinship relations, different forms of belief or practice, unique philosophies about human existence, traditional practices, and oral traditions. They also offer healing practices through traditional medicine, among many other characteristics.
At the same time, we stand behind the urgent need to raise awareness about the importance of engaging Indigenous peoples in global trade and providing them with the tools to fully harness the benefits of globalization, ensuring that these revert back to the community.
As APEC host this year, we have made progress in integrating this topic within our thematic agenda. One example is the Lima Roadmap to Promote the Transition to the Formal and Global Economy, which include elements aimed to ensure access to public, finance and digital services, among others.
We avail ourselves of this opportunity to put into perspective the indivisible characteristic of the efforts undertaken throughout this year by APEC economies to address the special needs of groups with untapped economic potential, like those affected by adverse conditions which may include Indigenous peoples.
As part of our domestic policy, Peru promotes bilingual education in 16 languages as well as the integration of an ethnic variable in our main economic surveys and registries. Likewise, nowadays we have at our disposal an official database of Indigenous peoples.
By implementing the border development and cross-border integration policy, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs oversees a diverse array of cooperation formulas that involve several of the Indigenous communities that inhabit the Amazon forest, aiming to provide them with the tools necessary to enhance their level of human development. These actions are implemented with the support of national and regional institutions, as well as contributions from international organizations, enabling Peru to meet its own development objectives while also fulfilling international commitments.
Through concrete initiatives, we have contributed to reducing the mortality rates of pregnant women and newborns, strengthened the capacities of children and the youth from vulnerable families, promoted income improvement, especially of women, and supported food security by fostering the technical development of Amazonian products in sustainable systems.
These actions are carried out by strengthening the capacities of native communities, based on their own priorities, and supporting leadership and management training, as well as the consolidation of economic organizations such as cooperatives. Among others, we have concrete results in the case of the Yine people that inhabit our border with Brazil as well as with the Ticuna and Yaguas peoples, from our border with Colombia.
I hope that the experiences shared in our dialogue last week will enrich the public policies of the represented economies, creating the necessary synergies to push forward our agenda of inclusive growth. We especially cherish the assets that Indigenous communities provided to the dialogue in terms of sustainability and its complementarity with the actions taken by the economies of APEC in different areas throughout this year.
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Ambassador Carlos Vasquez is the SOM Chair for APEC Peru 2024.