FPIC and UN-REDD in Paraguay

Abstract

The thesis is about the process of implementation of the international program against deforestation called UN-REDD in Paraguay and specifically about the Free Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC). This research builds on a six months multi-sited fieldwork in Asunción with shorter and longer stays in indigenous communities, specially in the oriental region in the Tekoha Guazu, among the Mbya-Guaranìs of the comunities of Ka'aguy' Pa'u' and Arroyo Moroti and in the Chaco as well. I wish to focus about the gap between the image of FPIC and those contexts in which it is supposed to be applied in practice, the gap between these two perceptions as well as the ways through which it is (re)produced. I suggest that the image of FPIC can be connected with the fetishism of law that can reduce complex social facts into legal label, thus giving the image of a legal fiction of consultations among generic stakeholders going on in a depoliticized atmosphere where all actors are supposedly equal as for the power-relationships.

But in order for the FPIC process to be actually free the interested parties have to be properly informed and represented and it has to be made sure that consultations occur in a context free from economic and political coercion. Through empirical findings from the Tekoha Guazu and from the general situation in Paraguay, I argue that there are issues concerning the circulation of information, visibility and representation as well as there are contexts marked by violence, chaos and lack of sovereignty which indicate uneven power-relationships. The lack of political, economic and food sovereignty is itself a precondition for those contexts free from coercion that form the base for the FPIC process.