Themes

Explore the key themes the Forest Peoples Programme addresses, including Human Rights, Climate Change and Biodiversity, Business, Trade and Finance, Deforestation, Community Governance, and Culture and Knowledge.

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Lands, Territories and Resources

Indigenous peoples have symbiotic relationships with their ancestral territories which are central to their identity, survival, well-being and self-determined development.

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Self-determination and FPIC

Self-determination is the right of all peoples, including indigenous peoples and forest peoples, to determine their futures.

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Peru

FPP has been working in the Peruvian Amazon since 1997 with Indigenous Peoples to defend against threats to their lands, livelihoods and cultures, including from harmful extractive industries, government policies and exclusionary conservation practices. We support partners to strengthen the self-governance and autonomy of their customary lands.

Country Overview

Peru is the fourth largest rainforest country in the world, with more than 60% of its landmass covered by Amazon forest. The Peruvian Amazon is home to over 330,000 Indigenous people, whose lifeways have contributed to sustaining the region’s incredible biocultural diversity across thousands of years.

These Indigenous Peoples face mounting structural threats driving the dispossession and destruction of their territories due to the lack of comprehensive mechanisms for the protection of their lands, rights and livelihoods.

Forest Peoples Programme works at the nexus between strengthening Indigenous Peoples’ defence against external threats to their collective rights, territories and livelihoods, the recovery and expansion of Indigenous territorial self-government and autonomy.

We currently work primarily with:

the Shipibo-Konibo people in Ucayali,
the Kichwa people in San Martin,
the Wampis Nation in the northern Amazon.
Indigenous Guards (with the Shipibo-Konibo, Ashaninka and Kakataibo peoples)

In addition, we partner with legal specialists the Instituto de Defensa Legal for our work on strategic litigation and legal capacity-building.

Main Activities

We support communities to monitor, protect and safeguard their territories against various threats, ranging from the expansion of illegal economies to top-down State-led interventions.
We provide communities with legal support and training to use strategic litigation - and other approaches - to enable them to exercise their collective rights over their territories, demand land restitution and end corporate impunity.
We work in solidarity with indigenous communities facing threats, attacks and killings to address the underlying structural causes of violence and forest destruction.
We support community-based initiatives to develop community economies as an alternative to the paradigm of conventional (often dominant and destructive) development from above as well as the strengthening of autonomous territorial self-governments as a means for indigenous peoples to decide their own futures.
We support indigenous partner organisations to strengthen their diverse communication channels.
We accompany intra and inter-community and regional processes to confront the dispossession and violence that affects indigenous territories, and support indigenous partners’ paths towards ‘buen vivir’ (living in harmony) with lives free from gender-based violence.