65 María Julia Oliva, Johanna von Braun and Gabriela Salinas Lanao
Photo: UEBT
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Elements of the AFIMAD community protocol.
ing the dialogue process to strengthen their
partnership.
Outcomes and lessons learnt
The work in Madre de Dios confirmed that
BCP approaches and methodologies can be
adapted to a range of contexts, including
ethical biotrade. For AFIMAD, the reflection on goals and values has reaffirmed its
significance within the communities and
fostered ongoing and planned activities.
AFIMAD was also able to reflect on how its
economic activities fitted within its goals as
a group of communities and as an association. As a result, it was able to communicate
with Candela Peru much more assertively
on issues such as sustainable resource use,
negotiation processes, how they want the
relationship between them to develop, and
the sharing of benefits. The communities
and Candela Peru are now better placed to
understand and address each other’s needs
and concerns in the context of their current
and future work. AFIMAD has also
expressed its commitment to ethical sourcing practices.
The work has resulted in a highly
adapted version of a BCP, renamed a ‘biocultural dialogue’ by project partners. In terms
of content, the dialogue reflected the interest
expressed by the communities in addressing
not only community-level issues, as is usual
in BCPs, but also their existing relationship
with Candela Peru, other commercial relationships, and the ethical biotrade context.
This meant that discussions were more
focused than in ‘conventional’ community
protocols, considering concrete challenges
and opportunities. Yet it is important that
the community reflection processes retain
the core elements of ‘conventional’ BCPs, in
order to ensure issues are discussed in the
appropriate biocultural context and to
provide a solid basis for ongoing engagement
with the company.
One of these core elements is the participatory approach used in the workshops,
which proved a valuable part of the process,
allowing community representatives to
discuss and jointly draft the content of the
BCP. Nevertheless, the involvement of the
wider community was quite limited, because