Traditional Peoples and Communities
The Peoples and Traditional Communities are groups that share and recognize themselves within a culture differentiated in relation to hegemonic society, collectively experiencing their own forms of social organization. These groups have a special relationship with the territories they occupy and with their natural resources, attributing to them a cultural, social, religious, ancestral and economic load.
They are characterized as Traditional Peoples and Communities in Brazil, for instance, riverside communities, flower pickers, coconut breakers, fishermen and artisanal fishermen, gypsies, shellfish, rubber tappers, chestnut trees, marshland, among other groups. According to data from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), these people number approximately 5 million Brazilians, occupying 1/4 of the national territory.
The construction of public policies addressed to these groups by the Brazilian State is recent. In spite of the ratification in 1989 of the International Labor Organization (OIT) Convention 169, which dealt with the rights of indigenous and tribal peoples in the world, in Brazil the issue was only addressed in 2007, through Decree 6040, which established the National Policy for the Sustainable Development of Traditional Peoples and Communities (PNPCT), coordinated by the Secretariat for Policies for the Promotion of Racial Equality (SEPPIR) of the Presidency of the Republic.
Nevertheless, most of these peoples and communities do not have access to public policies and are daily violated by external interests in their territories, being particularly affected by large socio-environmental projects. The resistance of the Peoples and Traditional Communities is mainly for the recognition of their territories, their citizenship and their cultural identity, daily violated by the racial, ethnic and religious discrimination of the State and society.
