Since the 19th century the land rights of forest dwellers in Cameroon have not figured in the major decisions by the rulers. All forest lands, defined as vacant and without owners --“vacant et sans maitres”-- became property of the state, and many forests were then opened for timber exploitation, which closed those areas for hunting by Bagyeli, Baka, and other so-called "Pygmy" hunter gathering communities, whose presence across Southern Cameroon predates the colonial State.
Bulletin articles
On October 1, an indigenous group living in Kenya's Mau Forest is scheduled to have its case heard in the country's High Court. The hearing is the latest attempt by the Ogiek people's long effort to protect their forest homeland from destruction.
The indigenous inhabitants of Rwanda are the Twa, a ‘Pygmy’ people who originally lived as hunters and gatherers in the high altitude forests around the lakes in the Albertine Rift area of central Africa, in the present-day countries of Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda and Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). In some parts of DRC, Twa are still able to live a forest-based existence. However, in most other areas the Twa have had to abandon their traditional way of life as their forests have been destroyed by logging, agriculture and "development" projects.
The Batwa (so-called Pygmies) are the Indigenous peoples of south-west Uganda. According to historical records and oral histories, only the Batwa inhabited this area until at least the mid sixteenth century. They have been mostly hunter-gatherers, some in the mountainous forests, and some in forest savannah or lake environments.
Despite decades of lobbying successive governments for full legal recognition of their traditional land rights, the 55-60,000 Amerindians in Guyana still find themselves in one of the most precarious land tenure situations in South America: many communities lack any legal land title whatsoever, while the others can only count on an insecure title which covers just a fraction of their ancestral territory, and which can be revoked unilaterally at any time by the Minister of Amerindian Affairs.
In December 2000 the Argentina-based company Pluspetrol won the concession to extract natural gas from the Camisea basin in South East Peru. However, Pluspetrol’s intention to conduct seismic and drilling operations within the Nahua/Kugapakori state reserve has attracted controversy because of potential impacts on its indigenous inhabitants living in voluntary isolation and initial stages of direct interaction with national society.
Chinese logging companies are relatively new arrivals in South America. In Suriname, at least two have been operating since 1997. The widely reported ban on domestic logging in China, in part prompted by devastating flooding related to forest loss, is one obvious reason for the internationalization of Chinese logging. According to Surinamese government statistics for the years 2000-01, Chinese loggers were by far the largest producers of round wood and China was by far the largest export destination for Surinamese round wood, exceeding the next highest destination fourfold.
The Caura river in Venezuela is the last large affluent of the Orinoco which has not been polluted, carved up, dammed or diverted by mining, roads, logging and large-scale development projects. The upper reaches are home to two ethnic groups, ‘Amazonian Indians’.
Since the fall of the Suharto dictatorship in 1998, a vigorous national struggle for recognition of indigenous rights has found voice in Indonesia. Embodied in the Alianzi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara (AMAN - the Alliance of the Peoples Governed by Custom of the Archipelago), this movement is demanding recognition of the rights of the indigenous peoples to their lands and to self-governance. Based on the constitutional recognition of adat (custom), the movement seeks to restore to the communities the power lost to the State in the centralising reforms of the 1960s and 1970s.
In July 2002, the World Bank released a "decision framework" on its involvement in the proposed Nam Theun 2 dam. The paper explains how the Bank intends to make a decision on whether or not to give a US$100 million loan for a political risk guarantee on the proposed 1,000 MW dam.
The Philippine archipelago is extremely rich in both biological and cultural diversity. It is one of the world's 12 biologically mega-diverse countries and hosts about 127 main cultural groups.
The uplands between the Yenisei and the Lena rivers are one of the last regions of unbroken boreal forest --"taiga"-- in Eurasia. This region is the homeland to Evenki, Ket, Sel’kup, Sakha, and Dolgan aboriginal hunters and herders. Although Cossack frontiersmen used the Yenisei, Lena, and Lower Tunguska rivers as their main route to subdue and integrate Eastern Siberia into the Russian Empire in the 17th Century, the central Siberian plateau escaped most of the dislocations of Russian and Soviet industrialism in the 19th and 20th Century.