India

A longstanding land conflict by the Adivasi indigenous people gave rise in January this year to a toll of some 15-20 (unconfirmed) Adivasis killed and some 32 injured by armed police. The attack was allegedly a response to armed action by Adivasis on wildlife officials with traditional weapons such as bows and arrows. The authorities say they have cleared a wildlife sanctuary which was illegally occupied.

The "Revised Forest Strategy of the World Bank Group" approved on October 31, 2002 makes some very significant admissions like: "There is a close link between the livelihoods of the poor and forests, and '(it is a) largely false notion that the poor are the cause of deforestation in developing countries'."

During a recent visit to Rajasthan state in India, Patrick McCully from International Rivers Network, had the opportunity to see first hand just how profoundly the work of a local organization called "Tarun Bharat Sangh" (TBS) has improved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. He was astounded to learn that this social and environmental transformation has been achieved at a tiny fraction of the economic --not to mention human and ecological-- cost of providing water services with big dams. Below some fragments of his experience:

"Nature can never be managed well unless the people closest to it are involved in its management and a healthy relationship is established between nature, society and culture. Common natural resources were earlier regulated through diverse, decentralized, community control systems. But the state's policy of converting common property resources into government property resources has put them under the control of centralized bureaucracies, who in turn have put them at the service of the more powerful."

India’s experiments with Joint Forest Management (JFM) grew out of attempts by forestry officials to accommodate ‘tribal’ demands to manage their own forests. [The indigenous peoples of India are officially referred to as ‘Scheduled Tribes’]. Under JFM forests remain the property of the State under the jurisdiction of Forest Departments but local communities are contracted to manage the forests and retain a portion of profits from the sale of harvests.

The world has something to celebrate: there is good news for the Jarawa. This largely uncontacted people who inhabit the Andaman Islands in the Indian ocean and have voluntarily chosen to continue almost completely isolated, have been harassed by encroachment on their lands by British and Indian settlers in the last 150 years.

Commissioned by the Global Forest Coalition This report is based on 21 country case studies, including Australia, Brazil, Cameroon, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Czech republic, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Kenya,Malaysia, the Netherlands, New Zealand/Aotearoa, Papua New Guinea, Russia, South Africa, Suriname, Uganda, United Kingdom, and Uruguay

The Jarawa are one of four surviving tribes living in the Andamans, a cluster of islands in the Bay of Bengal, India. Two of these tribes were settled by the colonial British and Indian authorities with catastrophic consequences: one, the Great Andamanese, of whom there were 5000 in 1948, now number only 41 individuals.

Norsk Hydro, a Norwegian corporation with investments in light metals, oil, petrochemicals and agriculture, along with Canadian transnational Alcan and India's Hindalco plans to mine bauxite on sacred tribal lands in Eastern Indian state of Orissa. The project would also process one million tonnes a year of bauxite through a joint venture with the company Utkal Alumina Industries Ltd (UAIL).

Elected forest councils (Van Panchayats) have been the only existing example of reasonably autonomous legal space for community forest management in India. After having managed for years demarcated village forests in Uttarakhand, the hill region of Uttar Pradesh, Van Panchayats are being replaced by top-down “participatory” forestry projects pushed by the World Bank.

It is common for people living far away from the forests to perceive deforestation as an exclusively environmental problem. However, for people whose livelihoods depend directly on them, forest loss is more a social than an environmental tragedy. And what is seldom perceived is that women suffer the consequences more than men. The following extracts from a case study on community forest management in India can be useful to begin to understand the issue:

The Adivasi indigenous people have lived in India since time immemorial. Today they constitute an ethnic minority referred to pejoratively as “tribals”. These people, even though being descendents of the original inhabitants of India, over the course of time, have been pushed aside to more marginal areas, sloping areas, and forestland. Only some decades ago the Adivasi still lived in slavery, without any political or civil rights, obliged to work in the factories owned by the Indian and European people. Nowadays their territorial rights continue to be ignored.