FOREST PEOPLES AS A PROBLEM?

The treatment of tropical forest dwellers by development organisations has been mixed. Government and international agencies have tended to view forest peoples as, at best, an archaic legacy of a pre-industrial era who have little or nothing to contribute to development and environmental policy. At worst, such populations are perceived as a downright obstacle to progress, or even a threat to national sovereignty, that need to be dragged, screaming if necessary, into the ‘modern’ age. Throughout history, indigenous and other traditional groups have seen their forest resource base come under attack as geographical frontiers have been pushed back in the name of national integration and economic development. The strategies adopted have included highway construction, cattle ranching, small farmer settlement, export crop production, commercial logging and hydropower expansion. Nations such as Brazil, Indonesia and Malaysia, amongst others, have all pursued aggressive strategies of tropical forest occupation in which the needs of the native peoples themselves have been routinely ignored.

Until relatively recently, the social and environmental consequences of such policies were rarely given a second thought by planners and policy-makers. It is no exaggeration to say that forest peoples were (and to a large degree still are) considered expendable in the march towards modernisation and nationhood. Perhaps the clearest indicator of such pressures is deforestation. It is calculated that by 1988 the world had already lost 40% of its tropical forests (Park, 1992).