Mr. President, Honourable Ministers, Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity, Distinguished delegates, Indigenous brothers and sisters; Today I’m speaking on behalf of the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity (IIFB).
After two weeks of continuous work, long discussions and many negotiations we reach the end of COP10. The IIFB representatives, including Indigenous women, have actively engaged in all these discussions with our proposals and deliberations.
Negotiations on an international regime on Access and Benefit Sharing for the use of genetic resources resulted in a new protocol at the tenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD) in Nagoya, Aichi, Japan, from 18 to 29 October 2010, where over 200 Indigenous representatives participated. The protocol was adopted in Japan on October 29th, and is now known as the Nagoya Protocol. A protocol is a treaty developed within a treaty, in this case within the CBD.
Land Acknowledgement
We acknowledge that we are headquartered on Massachusett land, in Cambridge, MA, and we thank the past, current, and future Indigenous stewards of this territory.
