editorial

Imposing boundaries, expropriating resources

N

atural resources of the Mekong Region, and the diverse systems of managing them, are being increasingly threatened by policies, regulations and projects designed to exploit the region’s natural wealth for corporate profit and economic development. A combination of state and private sector investments in dams, tree plantations, mining, roads and other infrastructure are transforming the region’s lands, rivers and forests – the basis of local livelihood security – into expendable resources for commercial exploitation. Despite promises of shared benefits to wider populations, development through the market is leaving many behind in its wake, while development projects and large infrastructure have impoverished entire communities whose resource base has been encroached upon, expropriated, degraded or destroyed. As the contributors to this issue of Watershed highlight, resource enclosure, dispossession and infringements of human rights, continue to occur in the name of ‘development’, ‘poverty alleviation’, ‘national integration’ and ‘conservation’. This language serves to obscure and ultimately rationalise the concentration and mobilisation of power to expropriate resources, the costs of which are borne by people who are relatively powerless in terms of their economic, political and social place in society. In this issue’s Community Voices, members of a local community in Thailand’s Udon Thani province speak of their struggle against a mining company that wants to dig for potash right under their homes and farmlands. Exemplary of how the state responds to business interests over the livelihood security and wellbeing of its own citizens, the Thai government specifically amended the law to allow the company to mine underneath people’s lands without their consent. More recently, the conflict has intensified as the company tries to demarcate the boundary of the mine site by placing benchmarks on people’s lands. This has been fiercely resisted by local communities who are aware that the benchmarks represent the expropriation of their farming and residential lands for mining. The drawing and imposition of new boundaries is a means of extending control over and making claims to resources. This is evident in land reform and titling programmes, purportedly aimed at providing secure tenure to communities over their lands and forests. However, these new boundaries

Page 2 Watershed Vol. 12 No. 2 March – October 2007

rarely reflect the diverse rural tenure arrangements, and in the process, communities are often dispossessed of their common lands and nonpermanent farming lands. As Keith Barney highlights in the Guest Column, by defining boundaries and prescribing ‘formal’ rights to use and access resources therein, land reform programmes in Laos, as elsewhere in the region, have facilitated the transfer of communal forest and fallow lands from the control of rural communities to commercial interests. Rather than ensuring communities’ continued access to resources, “the Lao government’s LFA tenure reform programme [in Ban Pak Veng] was the very mechanism whereby villagers’ lands were categorised as ‘degraded’ and zoned for commercial eucalyptus plantations.” Just as ‘tenure security’ can serve to justify the privatisation and expropriation of village common lands to more economically productive uses, so can notions of ‘nature conservation’ be used to evict communities from their homelands and deny their rights to access, use and manage resources. Throughout the region, many forest areas occupied and used by local communities have been declared ‘protected areas’, resulting in the displacement of thousands of predominantly ethnic communities. This has led to a situation where many protected areas are surrounded or partially occupied by an alienated local population who can no longer access the lands on which they previously depended. A large factor underlying the exclusion of communities from protected areas is the belief that to conserve the ecological integrity of high biodiversity areas, these areas must be clearly demarcated and ‘protected’ from human intervention. Although experience in the region demonstrates that in many cases communities are capable of and even necessary for managing and protecting forests, their resource use and management practices such as rotational swidden agriculture, are deemed a threat to forests and something to be controlled or eliminated. But while this perception of communities as a threat to protected areas denies them their right to access and use resources, large scale resource development projects deemed necessary to realising national development goals are allowed to proceed regardless of their impacts. In its bid to become the “battery of Southeast Asia”, the Lao government plans to develop at least 30 major hydropower projects, a number of which

would be located within or in close proximity to ‘protected areas’. For example, the Nam Theun 1 hydropower dam which is in advanced stages of planning would be built in the middle of the Nam Kading National Biodiversity Conservation Area. In addition to displacing an estimated 3,500 people, the dam’s reservoir would destroy large swathes of riverine and terrestrial wildlife habitats effectively dividing the protected area in two. There is clearly a selective application of regulations over resource use and conservation, particularly when presented with income-earning opportunities. Likewise, ‘protected areas’ in Burma, established with the support of international conservation organisations, appear to be driven more by the regime’s economic and political interests than any real commitment (on part of the regime) to conservation. As Vanessa Lamb reports, Burma’s largest protected area in Hugawng Valley, Kachin State, has achieved little in terms of addressing the biggest threats to the wildlife sanctuary, namely the large scale economic concessions for mining and plantations granted by Burma’s military regime. Instead, the Burmese junta continues to exploit the resources in and around the protected area for its own state-building and militarisation agendas. In the process, local residents’ homes and farmlands have been confiscated by military officials without compensation, while people’s access to forests and rivers have been increasingly denied, either directly through use of force or indirectly through the degradation and contamination of their resource base. The establishment of protected areas thus becomes another mechanism for the Burmese military dictatorship to extend and consolidate its political and economic control over disputed indigenous territories along the borders. In this context, the involvement of international organisations in conservation initiatives is directly or indirectly “providing tacit endorsement to a regime that uses violence to control people and its resources under the guise of ‘conservation’ and ‘development’”. While perhaps less explicitly violent, the strategic targeting of peripheral regions and indigenous territories for ‘development’ can also be seen in other countries in the region. Cambodia’s peripheral northeastern region, home to the largest indigenous and ethnic minority population, has become the new ‘frontier’ for resource extraction activities. After being largely inaccessible from the rest of Cambodia throughout the 1980s, improved security conditions and better

roads has eased access to the northeastern provinces and the rich natural resources therein. The subsequent influx of investors and ethnic Khmers from the capital and other parts of the country seeking to profit from ‘cheap’ land and other resources has been a main factor exacerbating the loss of lands and livelihoods of indigenous people. As Dave Hubbel notes, “Representatives of indigenous communities in Ratanakiri [province, northeast Cambodia] cite as the major threat to their communities and societies the expropriation of their homelands – their farmlands and even their house plots and villages, their swiddens and other forestlands, and their grazing lands and fishing grounds – by non-indigenous people and state agencies.” The granting of large tracts of land to private companies for economic concessions, which has intensified in recent years, has become a tool for companies and powerful individuals to seize the assets of rural communities, resulting in forced evictions and loss of access to lands and forests. As Shalmali Guttal emphasises, “Not only is poverty not being alleviated, on the contrary more people are becoming impoverished and economically vulnerable.” As more lands and forests are demarcated for protected areas or sold as economic concessions for plantations and mining, and rivers claimed for large scale hydropower and irrigation projects, the inherently unequal opportunities to derive benefits from conventional economic development is becoming increasingly apparent. Those who are excluded, moreover, are facing increased insecurity of livelihood as their knowledge of and relationships with their environments are marginalised, and their right to determine economic, social and cultural development on their own terms continually ignored or denied. In the words of a community leader in Udon Thani province, “The government always claims it wants to bring ‘development’ to the people, but…They do it for the people in name only… That’s why local people need to stand up to protect their resources. We cannot let the government make all the decisions over our resources.” Indeed, communities’ rights to use, access and manage their lands, forests and rivers, including the right to say ‘no’ to development projects that threaten people’s wellbeing, need to be recognised and respected. Otherwise, the conflict, dislocation, and violence inflicted by ‘development’ will continue to escalate, making the pursuit of diverse aspirations and visions of what constitutes ‘development’ increasingly difficult.

Watershed Vol. 12 No. 2 March – October 2007 Page 3