- Africa: Impacts of Protected Areas on Indigenous Peoples

It is now well-documented how indigenous communities face serious discrimination from their societies, are exploited by others, and possess little protection for their resource rights upon which they rely to secure their livelihoods. Many of these groups also live in areas where local, national and international conservation organisations maintain strong interests. New conservation principles for conservation projects affecting indigenous communities were therefore approved by the World Conservation Congress in 1992, setting out standards and implementing guidelines promoted by the World Commission on Protected Areas, WWF and the IUCN.

Key concepts embodied in these principles, include:

- Recognition for “the rights of indigenous peoples to their lands and territories and natural resources, as well as their role in management, use and conservation,” and the “role and collective interests of indigenous peoples”;
- The obligation to “protect and encourage customary use of biological resources in accordance with traditional practices that are compatible with conservation or sustainable use requirements”, as set out in the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD);
- A recognition of indigenous peoples property rights based upon traditional occupation and use, as recognised through the African Charter on Human Rights.

Forest Peoples Project (FPP) is reaching the end of almost three years of collaborative work to document the impact of conservation areas on the lives of indigenous peoples from seven African countries, which completes a suite of collaborative projects carried out by FPP in Latin American and Asia since 1997.

In Africa FPP supported local groups to prepare nine case studies on the basis of community consultations with Batwa from Nyungwe Natural Forest and the Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda, Mgahinga and Bwindi National Parks in Uganda, and from around the Kahuzi-Biega National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Maasai from around the Ngorongoro Conservation Authority in Tanzania, Ogiek from the Mau Forest Complex in Kenya, Khomani San from the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park (formerly Kalahari Gemsbok National Park) in South Africa, Bagyeli from the Campo Ma’an National Park in Cameroon, and Baka from the Dja Reserve and Boumba Bek and Lobéké National Parks in Cameroon.

Conservation authorities from these countries also provided information and participated in regional project meetings, and after the 2001 Kigali conference organised by CAURWA --the Rwandan Twa NGO-- and FPP, several conservation authorities from case study areas met with indigenous representatives to discuss park policies – in most cases for the first time.

One of the most worrying findings of initial work by our partners was that the widely agreed World Commission on Protected Areas’ principles are not being applied in any of the cases. The failure of conservation organisations to implement these international standards has led to serious impacts on indigenous communities, including:

- forced expulsions from their lands without compensation;
- the elimination of their rights over their traditional lands;
- the progressive destruction of their livelihoods;
- the loss of their identities, and;
- increasing socio-economic marginalisation of their communities.

“You speak to me of the parks, and all that I know is that the authorities and soldiers came from far away, in order to chase us away with guns, and tell us never to return to the volcanoes, where we were forbidden to hunt, look for honey, water and wood.” (Twa, Rwanda)

A persistent complaint from indigenous communities in almost all of the cases criticises the lack of consultation with them over conservation plans. In most cases their problems were compounded by the lack of recognition for their traditional access and use rights within lands now zoned as protected areas.

“When they were setting up the park, no one came to consult with us, the Bagyeli. Maybe they went to talk to the Bantu, but me I don't know anything about this. They do not know us.” (Bagyeli, southwest Cameroon)

Conservation management plans for lands upon which indigenous peoples rely have almost always been accompanied by restrictions against indigenous hunters, gatherers and pastoralists without their consent, restricting their use of areas where they have traditionally exercised access and use rights. This holds true even when it is well known that they were the first inhabitants of the area, traditionally the main criteria for securing long term customary rights to natural resources in Africa.

When “community consultations” have been held by conservation organisations with communities over plans, they have usually been in the form of broad community meetings to introduce and discuss new rules, fora in which the interests of marginalised groups tend to be neglected, and indigenous communities are often ill-informed about the processes in play. The lack of translation facilities and background documentation in an accessible language generally puts them at a distinct disadvantage in most of the discussions held, especially given the high illiteracy rates amongst these groups generally.

As the World Parks Congress nears in September, conservation organisations working in Africa are looking more closely at how they can address community issues “beyond boundaries”, at the same time holding an eye out for new sources of funding from donors who will want to know how their funds will be supporting people’s livelihoods AND the sustainable use of natural resources AND biodiversity protection. Elsewhere there is strong rhetoric about the need to enhance new, local “partnerships,” for example in the Congo Basin, in order to promote more efficient and sustainable conservation projects, without there being any mechanism to enable local communities to be consulted about their plans.

Recent moves by some conservation organisations to highlight their “community orientation” may simply be posturing to enable good public relations during a high profile international conference focussing on this theme. However their accompanying rhetoric raises expectations amongst NGOs and communities about how they will actually address practical questions about indigenous peoples’ rights in and around protected area projects, where many of these people live, and how these projects will lead to the generation of benefits in exchange for the loss of rights. This is particularly important for marginalised communities who rely on protected areas for their livelihoods, especially for those who hunt, gather and herd. These groups often have very strong prior claims to lands targeted for conservation.

“Your question- we have found one answer. The forest, the men of the Dobi Dobi (conservationists) would like to enter the forest. This man (a Baka) he was raised in the forest. They (the Dobi dobi) should come to him and give him something, in order to secure permission to go into the forest. If they do not give him money, then he will not give permission to enter the forest behind his house, because that forest is for him.” (Baka, southeast Cameroon)

Indigenous representatives from all of the countries involved in this project will participate in World Parks Congress discussions in Durban (South Africa), along with other indigenous community representatives from all over the world. This is therefore a prime opportunity for conservation organisations to reassert their commitment to implement the WCPA Guidelines on indigenous peoples, and the Convention on Biological Diversity. If they fail to do this, and to explain in detail the practical changes they will make to their conservation programmes to address indigenous rights and aspirations it will become increasingly difficult to convince communities that conservation bodies will be able to promote benefits for them in return for the loss of their livelihood base. The long-term sustainability of many protected areas in Central Africa hangs in the balance.

FPP is continuing its work in Central African countries to support indigenous forest communities to protect their rights and livelihoods. Most of these groups have a hunting and gathering past, and most still rely on the forest to serve many or all of their subsistence needs. However few of them are regarded as valid stakeholders by forest ecosystem conservation projects, whose managers generally do not consult with them over conservation plans over the lands and resources they control.

“If you do not gather, you cannot get soap, if you do not fish, then you cannot eat salt, if you do not have any area to plant, you have to go out and buy food, but we cannot buy - If you have clothes like this you cannot afford to go buy food. You can see how I am dressed. And I am all alone now – because I can do nothing already - because they want to prevent me from using the forest.” (Baka, southeast Cameroon)

FPP’s goal is to promote constructive and more equal dialogue between forest communities and conservation agencies, and to develop new models of working together founded on a recognition of local peoples’rights. This project has enabled several such processes to begin, but there are still important impediments to enabling the WCPA guidelines to come into force. They include reasons from the lack of appreciation for the need for local participation by indigenous communities, to unfair persecution of them by ecoguards; a lack of consultation by conservation authorities, and; the lack of funding for “social” work at the expense of biological inventories, commercial bushmeat hunting surveys, and the development of local paramilitary infrastructures.

In addition to core protected zones, many conservation projects subsequently secure the “protection” of surrounding areas using funds earmarked for “community-oriented” programmes linked to more regulated zonation schemes with “community managed-hunting zones, etc. A minority of these schemes have involved some of the dominant local groups in discussions over the management of these areas. However, where such processes that do exist in Central Africa, from Cameroon to Rwanda, the views of Twa, Baka, Bagyeli, Bakola, Mbendjelle, Ba’Aka, Mbuti and other indigenous forest populations have almost always been ignored. All of these communities’ rights, and with them their livelihoods, are under increasing pressure; in some contexts indigenous communities’ land rights have been totally eliminated, and they have been pushed out of their ancestral areas, forced to resort to begging or working for others for little or no remuneration in order to survive. Many indigenous communities face deepening poverty and increased livelihood instability as conservation projects establish themselves in their areas.

In Durban this year, along with a range of conservation standard-setting exercises, many deals over funding for conservation will be agreed, and this will help guide conservation direction over the next decade. If people are to become the new focus for conservation, then the reality of peoples’ lives and rights must be addressed by conservation projects, especially if they are going to face serious negative impacts from parks or reserves. The development of new mechanisms to ensure that indigenous peoples’ views and rights are taken into account during project planning is an essential first step if this is to start to happen.

By: John Nelson, Forest Peoples Programme, e-mail: johnnelson@blueyonder.co.uk , web page: www.forestpeoples.org

(A book entitled “Indigenous peoples and protected areas in Africa: from principles to practices”, which sets out the lessons from this project is now available from FPP in French and English. A video containing community views will also be made available in September as an MPEG-CD, playable on most PCs. Both will be available to delegates in Durban.)

---

top

- Africa: Tribal Peoples Pay High Price for Wilderness Protection

Exxon's £1.3bn Chad-Cameroon pipeline stretches 1,000km across arid lands and equatorial forest to the African coast. When it reaches west Cameroon it runs adjacent to an old wildlife reserve where, for centuries, thousands of indigenous Bagyeli pygmies have depended on the forest for hunting and medicines.

As "compensation" for any disturbance, the World Bank, the Dutch government and international conservation group Tropenbos combined in 1999 to create the giant Campo Ma'an national park. The stated aim was to protect the forest, alleviate poverty and to allow scientific research.

But a new book, From Principles to Practice, documenting nine major African conservation efforts in six central African countries, claims that the Campo Ma'an project is a disaster, threatening to destroy the Bagyeli cultural heritage and knowledge and impoverish the people further.

The Bagyeli, it says, are now barred from entering a 2,000sq km zone of forest which has been put aside for scientific research, and cannot hunt or take anything from a further 4,000sq km area. With less game to hunt and less access to their medicinal plants, many have become sedentary farmers - very much against their will.

The book is based on a two-year study of many of Africa's most ambitious conservation projects, led by the Forest Peoples Programme (FPP), an international human rights group. It is in no doubt that the Bagyeli have been ignored by the conservationists. "It seems clear that ... the sole concern has been to advance science, with no other considerations. This is no doubt a noble objective but the people who are now paying the price, particularly the pygmies, are not the beneficiaries of this 'grandiose' work," it says.

Several thousand of the Bambuti Ba'twa tribe used to live in the low equatorial forests to the west of the Rwandan border, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In the 1970s, their lands were designated a zoological and forest reserve, then a national park to protect gorillas and the pygmies were evicted in the name of conservation. Today the park is full of people mining the metallic ore coltan, and the gorillas, as well as the baboons, porcupines, wild boar and monkeys, are being systematically killed.

"Life was healthy and good but we have become beggars, thieves and prowlers," said one Bambuti chief in the report. "This has been imposed on us by the creation of the national park."

Conservation, whether by government or international groups, has immeasurably worsened the lives of indigenous peoples throughout Africa, says the FPP. Its local researchers found forced expulsions, lack of awareness or respect for indigenous people's rights, human rights violations and the progressive destruction of livelihoods in Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, South Africa, Cameroon and Tanzania. "It is estimated that some 1m sq km of forests, savannah, pasture and farmland in Africa have been redefined since 1970 as protected or conservation areas yet in the great majority of these areas, the rights of indigenous peoples to own, control and manage these areas have been denied", says Marcus Colchester, director of the FPP. "No one knows how many people have been displaced by these protected areas and little has been done to ameliorate the suffering and poverty that has resulted," he says.

International conservation, funded by global bodies such as the World Bank and the EU and by donations from supporters of conservation groups, has, he says, been reluctant to accept that indigenous peoples have any role to play in protecting nature. People living in forests have traditionally been seen as a threat to animals and plants, and been treated abominably, says Colchester.

Yet there has never been so much protection of forest peoples around the world. Major advances have been made in international law to define the rights of indigenous peoples; the UN's world conservation union (IUCN) more than 30 years ago called for governments and conservation bodies to respect indigenous people's rights, and the conservation community, led by the WWF, has developed principles and guidelines to reconcile indigenous rights and scientific initiatives. Moreover, global agreements such as the convention on biological diversity now impose obligations on governments to protect indigenous peoples.

The reality, says FPP, is that virtually none of the new principles have filtered down to ground level in Africa, South America or south-east Asia, where indigenous peoples are consistently marginalised. Conservation groups, argues the FPP, often hide behind countries' deep reluctance to grant land rights, and there is growing mistrust between groups working to protect the forests and those working for the people.

"Conservationists feel that their job is to protect nature," says Dorothy Jackson, coordinator of the FPP's Africa programme. "There is a strong feeling that wildlife and people are not compatible. They do recognise the social aspect of their work but say it's unfair to put the onus on them. National legislation itself often ignores indigenous people's rights and conservationists argue that it is the state's job to define areas and protect people." Conservationists, who tend to have money and influence with governments, could push far harder to protect people, Jackson says.

One of the most worrying examples in Africa is in the Volcanoes national park in Rwanda, where the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, the International Gorilla Conservation programme, and a Rwandan government organisation work with leading international donations to conduct scientific research on gorillas and to promote ecotourism.

The national park, which was set up in 1924 and is now only a third of its original size, attracts thousands of westerners a year, each prepared to pay £160 for less than an hour with the gorillas. In 1974, the Ba'twa pygmy tribes of the area were evicted and forbidden to hunt, cut trees, quarry stone, introduce new plants or in any way threaten the animals or the ecosystem.

The majority now live in squalor on the edge of the park, without work or food, receiving nothing from the tourist revenues and no help from the conservation groups. "Their villages are covered in human waste," says Kalimba Zephyrin, the author of the Rwanda case study for the FPP. "They do not have plates, forks or beds. One dwelling of 2 sq metres may be shelter for five to eight people - the majority of whom are children and orphans either poorly dressed or even without clothes. Some 70% of the people live by begging and they are not even allowed into the park where they used to hunt."

"It is better to die than to live like this," said one Ba'twa leader.

Following the Rio Earth summit in 1992, many countries leapt to create national parks and conservation areas, as new international money became available from the World Bank's $600m (£388m) Global Environment Facility and from the EU. Cameroon has a target to conserve 30% of all national land. This is welcomed by conservationists concerned about rampant overlogging, but the rush to protect the trees strikes fear into many communities.

In the early 1990s, the EU asked the IUCN to help develop a regional network of protected areas across central Africa to promote conservation. This led to the creation of the Dja wildlife reserve, on land which had been home to the nomadic Baka tribe in southern Cameroon.

When a team of investigators from Cameroon travelled last year to the reserve, they reported deep confusion in the forest. Several Baka villages in the centre of the reserve had been evicted and the people did not know whether they were allowed into the forest, or whether they could hunt. "This is where we are from. It is our forest," said Nkoumto Emmanuel from one of the affected villages. "We have to go there to look for fruit, vines, game and other products because the forest is very rich there."

Samuel Nguiffo, author of the Dja study, said: "The conservation project marked the start of a rupture with the Baka lifestyle. Some believed all hunting was forbidden, others said access to the reserve was forbidden. People complained that they were not consulted and not even told that their village was in the reserve."

Nguiffo found deep mutual mistrust between the Baka and the conservationists. "The opposition between development and conservation - between the world view of conservation projects and that of indigenous peoples - is blatant and seems unlikely to be resolved in the short term given the gulf of understanding that separates them. One is the dream of conservation organisations concerned about preserving species, and the other is that of indigenous communities whose modes of living are inextricably linked to the forest," says Nguiffo.

Sometimes, however, the dreams of neither group are realised. When the Maasai pastoralists of Tanzania were made to give up the rich Serengeti lands by the British colonial government in 1955, they were promised water, grazing lands, veterinary services, health services and more if they moved to the nearby highlands, in particular the Ngorongoro crater, and the northern highlands forest reserve.

The promises were never delivered and the life of the Maasai in the newly created Ngorongoro conservation area, according to a team of FPP investigators who visited the communities in 2001, is "a shambles". They found that most water supply systems in the conservation area had collapsed or had been taken over by tourist hotels, the Maasai were not benefiting from the huge amounts of money generated by the wildlife and conservation, and that mistrust between the two camps was building.

The researchers also found that the conservation of plants and animals was in poor shape. "Wildlife numbers have decreased dramatically compared to the time before the conservation area was founded. The natural vegetation is not in a good state. This, we suspect, is the result of the conservationists not paying heed to the indigenous methods of conservation practised by the Maasai."

By: John Vidal. “Ousted of Africa. The parks were created to protect the African wilderness. But the tribal peoples are paying a high price.” The Guardian, 21 August 2003. “From Principles to Practice” is published by the Forest Peoples Programme, e-mail: info@fppwrm.gn.apc.org

---

top

- Congo, Republic: Apes suffer from marriage between loggers and conservationists

Humankind’s closest relatives, the African Great Apes, may have vanished from the wild by the end of this century. The combined pressures of habitat loss and bushmeat hunting are driving them towards extinction. Unless these pressures are curbed, soon, there seems little hope that the dwindling populations of forest-dwelling mountain gorilla, lowland gorilla, chimpanzee and bonobo can sustain themselves for long.

African forest-dwelling peoples have lived close to, hunted and eaten these animals for thousands of years. Apes are considered to be powerful beings in these peoples’ religious and cultural systems and, according to many who live in the Congo basin, some of this power passes to those who eat them. Bushmeat, including the meat of wild apes, is thus highly prized and has long been locally traded. However, since the 1950s, this trade has been increasing exponentially. The widespread availability of shotguns and heavy calibre lead slugs, rising urban populations, new roads and vehicles, river transportation and above all the penetration of forests by logging have intensified hunting pressures on wildlife, especially apes.

Smuggled in logging trucks and timber barges, freezers and even aeroplanes, bushmeat now travels hundreds even thousands of miles from forest to market where it can command prices significantly higher than less culturally valued meats like beef, chicken and pork. Powerful syndicates, often connected to politicians and government officials, have emerged to control and profit from this lucrative trade, snaring marginal rural communities and isolated hunters into webs of patron-client relations and tempting them into robbing their forests of their game for short-term gain - forests in which they no longer have recognised rights and which are being relentlessly pillaged, often by European-owned logging companies. Logging, in itself rarely legal and almost always unsustainable, is a major cause for the intensification of the bushmeat trade. Logging roads bring communications to previously isolated regions. Logging camps bring in new workers and cash incomes to forest areas creating a heavy demand for more bushmeat. Logging networks link the forests to new and distant markets, for bushmeat as well as timber.

The main response of conservationists to this threat has been to establish protected areas, where they hope to conserve small pockets of undisturbed habitat, home to some of the last populations of these animals. To secure these areas, conservation agencies have had to work closely with local loggers, neighbouring communities and other interests. They have been obliged to fit their schemes into prevailing power structures and development plans, sometimes making compromises and even forging alliances with uncomfortable bedfellows.

In the Republic of Congo, one of the best known conservation projects is the Nouabale-Ndoki National Park, supported by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) of New York. The Park, which lies in the extreme north of the country bordering Cameroon and the Central African Republic, is run out of the nearby town of Ouesso. Ouesso is a major logging town, just upstream from the base of a German-owned company, Congolaise Industrielle des Bois (CIB) which employs some 1,200 people and has forest concessions three times the size of the Park. About a quarter of a million cubic metres of timber are hauled out of the concession every year – equivalent to one giant truckload of timber every fifteen minutes of the working day. This industrial boom has brought in some 16,000 people as workers, dependents and in service industries, who have almost overwhelmed the previous, sparse population of BaBenjelle ‘Pygmies’ and neighbouring Bantu. Feeding this population has been a problem for the company and there is evidence that – at least in the past if not today – CIB logging teams were encouraged to hunt for bushmeat within the concession. Video documentaries and subsequent research has also implicated CIB trucks in transporting chimpanzee and other forms of bushmeat along the logging roads that lead down to the coast of Cameroon.

The WCS has long known of CIB’s impact on wildlife and its involvement in the extraction of bushmeat but has done little to give these findings prominence. In 1995, the WCS and a team of IUCN assessors even co-signed a Protocol with CIB which repudiated ‘unjustified attacks’ made on CIB - the evidence in the video documentaries. CIB, which has been unwilling to submit its forestry operation to scrutiny by independent certification processes like FSC, has been able to vaunt its close relations with WCS to fend off criticism of its operations: ‘I have opened my concession for research… for forestry and wildlife studies’, claims CIB owner Hinrich Stoll, my company is ‘working very closely with the Congolese National Park, Nouabale Ndoki, which is managed by Mr JM Fay of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), (the oldest non-governmental ecological organisation in the world).’

These allegations are set out in detail in a powerful new book, ‘Eating Apes’, written by Dale Peterson. Peterson admits that WCS has since embarked on a joint project with CIB to limit the bushmeat trade in the area surrounding the Park, but argues that such partnerships between loggers and the conservationists, who rely on logging company infrastructures to gain access to their parks, are perpetuating the main threat to Africa’s forests. By offering green cover for loggers, he argues, conservationists are legitimising forest destruction and so putting further pressure on wildlife and local communities. Since CIB signed its Protocol it has been able to more than double the size of its concession and Stoll has been invited to join the World Bank’s prestigious CEO’s Forum, which aims to promote further partnerships between leading forest industrialists and conservation bigwigs.

There is much more in this very readable book which is shocking and thought provoking. It is also quite evidently the record of a personal quest for the sacred in nature, written by a thoughtful, compassionate and committed environmentalist. Dale Peterson’s moment of epiphany came to him when he heard forest apes laughing. He has since become convinced that apes have consciousness, a mind, a ‘legitimate mental existence’. The fact that they have been found to share about 98% of their genetic make-up with humans for him adds scientific weight to his conviction that, however much we may respect the right of other societies to their own ways of life, the killing of apes is immoral. It may also be unwise. He has painstakingly assembled all the information available on the origins and spread of HIV/AIDS and shows convincingly that the two kinds of HIV viruses entered human populations through the butchering and eating of apes and monkeys. ‘Eating Apes’ is an important book that will challenge many to rethink their place in the world.

Source: Marcus Colchester, Forest Peoples Programme reviewing ‘Eating Apes’ by Dale Peterson, University of California Press, Berkeley, 290pp, 16 colour plates, ISBN 0-520-23090-6. £17.95 see also www.greatapeproject.org