By Matthew Russell Lee
UNITED NATIONS, April 20 -- When the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues meeting started up on April 20, Inner City Press asked about the World Bank's “Climate Fund,” and Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott's closing down aboriginal communities and what he called the “lifestyle choice” they represent.
The new chair of the Permanent Forum, Professor Megan Davis, said that Abbott's comments had not gone down well in Australia, and not only about aboriginal people. She asked if farming, heavily subsidized, is not lifestyle choice. Some surmise it's hydrocarbons under the land that explains the closing of the communities.
And now Abbott is going to New Zealand - where he faces further protests of his remarks and actions.
Joan Carling, also on the UN panel on April 20, told Inner City Press that the Climate Fund, REDD and similar project involve reducing the forests to the carbon issue and to payments.
On extractive industries, set for delivery on April 21 is a presentation on self-harm and suicide caused by “governments, extractive industries and multinational corporations raping and destroying Mother Earth.”
The recommendations include that “the UNFCCC and the forthcoming Paris accord include legally binding commitments of the Parties to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at source by 60 to 80%, without false solutions to climate change including carbon trading, carbon offsets, the Clean Development Mechanisms, REDD+, Carbon Capture and Storage or agrofuels.”
The speech is to be delivered from a person on the front lines -- from North Dakota., Kandi Mossett of the Indigenous Environment Network. Watch this site.
Footnote: While the above press conference was in the UN Press Briefing Room, and we hope to have UN video soon, there was no UN transcript or even summary made. Worse, the UN collaborated with its UN Censorship AllianceUNCA in shifting the Chagos Refugees Group's Olivier Bancoult into an almost empty session in UNCA's private club, not on UNTV, not reported. (Inner City Presspreviously asked about the Chagossians, here to outgoing UK Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant, who seemingly against character turned censor-inward in farewell.) Inner City Press based on similar collusion by UNCA quit the group and co-founded the Free UN Coalition for Access which is covering the Forum and how the UN treats it.
