Our ancestors have taught us the important value of respect to sustain our dignity as persons. We
believe that a person will not be whole if he does not know how to respect. As such, this value had
ingrained in us our tradition of asking permission and acquiring consent before doing anything that
involves other people, their rights, their property, and most importantly, the unseen spirits who are
believed to be guardians of the land and territories and the resources therein, for fear of being cursed.
Asking permission and acquiring consent is a manifestation of upholding the dignity and rights of the
members of the communities in the territories. We are bound to this culture of respect towards people,
to our land and its resources.
Our customary laws will show that resources within the territories which are not taken cared of
personally by certain persons are owned by community members. Thus, everyone is consulted and be
involved in the decision-making. This is our manifestation of respect towards one another and the
common rights we have over common resources.
However, nothing in our tradition has exposed us more vulnerably to the disintegration of this matter of
respect than the law that has allowed other people to enter our territories which caused chaos rather
than development. We have been caught unprepared in the context of consent involving large-scale
development projects. Different experiences of Subanen communities have shown the different aspects
and ways of getting consent that the law provides than what we have been dealing with through our
customs and traditions.
The 2006 Guidelines on Free Prior and Informed Consent to which we, as inhabitants of the state, are
bound by law to adhere to has become the source of conflict between what is legal and what is
customary. We believe that the provisions of the 2006 FPIC Guidelines in relation to obtaining proper
consent do not respect Subanen customary laws and processes for these run counter to how we see the
inter-relatedness of people, nature and the spirits within the ancestral territories and the role it plays in
the decision making process.
We believe that the implementation of the 2006 FPIC guidelines had negatively affected the culture and
traditions of Subanen communities across Zamboanga Peninsula. Therefore, we call on the government,
especially the National Commission on Indgenous Peoples (NCIP), to impose a moratorium on the
implementation of the FPIC processes in Zamboanga Peninsula and resolve the issues concerning it, and
adopt a new set of guidelines to regulate the entry of large-scale development projects affecting
ancestral territories which are culturally appropriate to the Subanen communities.
We call on the government to respect our rights as indigenous peoples, to uphold the primacy of our
customary laws within our ancestral territories. To sustain our tradition and practices, and as our
strong assertion for the NCIP to respect our customary processes relative to consent, we are pushing for
the adoption of the following guidelines for the regulation of the entry of large-scale development
projects within Zamboanga Peninsula :
For application of Certification Precondition: