From August 1996, new frontiers, fr

[brelief@xxxxxxx]

Subject: From August 1996, new frontiers, from Tourism Invesitgation &  Monitoring Team

NEW FRONTIERS

Monthly Briefing on Tourism, Development and Environment Issues
in the Mekong Subregion

Vol. 2. No.8
August 1996

APPALLING:
ADB PLANS TO RELOCATE
60 MILLION ETHNIC PEOPLE

(TN: 4.8.96; 8.8.96 BP: 4.8.96; ADB-DP: 31.7.96] - UP to 60 million people
living in the hill areas of the Mekong sub-region could be relocated as part
of ongoing development and for environmental reasons, according to Asian
Development Bank (ADB) sources. 

The governments of the six Mekong riparian countries are prepared to
cooperate with the ADB over two environmental improvement projects - with
some US$300 million a year to be spent during the next decade. The projects
will be officially endorsed at the forthcoming ADB-sponsored ministerial
meeting in Kunming, Yunnan, from 28 to 30 August. This was announced by the
Director of the ADB's Programmes Department, Noritada Morita at a press
conference which reported on the results of the second meeting of the
Greater Mekong Subregion's (GMS) Working Group on the environment, held from
30 July to 1 August at the Asian Institute of Technology in Bangkok. 

However, the new projects - the first on poverty alleviation in watershed
areas and the second on regional technical assistance for the management of
the Tonle Sap and river system in Cambodia - will undoubtedly spark great
controversies as they may involve the displacement of millions of
highlanders. A related discussion paper on the management of watershed areas
in the GMS restates the argument that mountain peoples practicing shifting
cultivation are major contributors to forest destruction and suggests that
possible solutions are settlement programs that convince and encourage
ethnic groups to practice permanent agriculture in fixed areas suitable for
agriculture.

The ADB estimates that the annual deforestation rate in the GMS is half a
million hectares and that one third is due to slash-and-burn planting
techniques, while the rest of the loss results from encroachment and illegal
logging. Morita said: "We may need to reduce the population of people in the
mountainous areas and bring them back to normal 
life. They will have to settle in one place ... but don't call it
resettlement. It is just migration."  He also noted that these people are
usually not a part of their national economies because they are isolated
from markets. Therefore, according to the banker, there is a need to build
road networks to enable governments to reach remote areas and to introduce
highlanders into the market system. In view of expected criticism of the ADB
plans, Morita commented: "It is impossible for us to keep (local people)
from modernization and the advanced technology of globalization. It is a
question of balancing (gains and losses)."
 
The views and proposed policy by the ADB reveal a distressingly
narrow-minded approach, which totally denies indigenous peoples' struggle
for cultural identity, their aspirations for self-determination and
territorial integrity, and customary rights to use land and natural
resources according to their traditions and spiritual beliefs. Experiences
from all over the world tell us that large-scale resettlement schemes or
"migration," Morita's preferred term, have just created hardships for local
people, rather than contributed to nature conservation and the improvement
of social and economic welfare, as the ADB wants to make people believe.
Accompanying efforts to integrate ethnic communities into the market-driven
economic system have resulted in tremendous losses of livelihoods and
disruption of social and cultural life. Nor have poor locals gained much
from large road projects; they have rather prompted wealthy businessmen to
take over more and more land and to exploit natural resources in hitherto
remote areas. 

It is also an irony that the ADB strategists refer to development and
resettlement projects targeting hill tribe communities in Thailand as models
to build on. Reliable research indicates clearly that such programmes have
generally failed to alleviate poverty. Many highlanders, who were promised
cultivable land and improved living conditions in new settlement areas, were
left with empty hands and had to move further into upland forests in search
of suitable land for subsistence farming. Others migrated to the cities and
often ended up as beggars and prostitutes. 

Tourism has been massively promoted as an alternative source of income, but
this has increasingly produced ~human zoo. situations where ethnic people
pose as photogenic objects for money and stimulate the tourists' nostalgic
desire for the exotic, untouched and primitive. Is this the kind of normal
life that ADB representative Noritada Morita is offering the 60 million
ethnic people in the Mekong sub- region? 

Currently, some 1,300 Hmong and Karen people in a national park in
Thailand's northern province Kampheng Phet are facing a food crisis and the
threat of eviction after being prohibited last from cultivating their land
and being closely watched by forestry rangers, military officers and border
patrol police, sent to "control deforestation". While the authorities claim
the villagers were living illegally on national park land, the affected
Hmong and Karen have given evidence that they have inhabited the area for
generations and that their lifestyle does not harm the natural environment.
We believe that these villagers can live in harmony with nature, like many
other forest-based communities. They did not encroach on the national park;
in fact, just the opposite happened," said Somsuek Benjawittayatham of the
Northern Farmers Network which supports the affected ethnic communities.
Without farmland, crops and forest resources, and with little or no money,
these and other villagers, who face a similar desperate situation, have no
other choice than to fight for their rights. (For more on ethnic peoples
issues, see the Burma, Cambodia and Thailand sections.) 

Published and distributed by: Toward Ecological Recovery and Regional
Alliance (TERRA)

Contact address: TERRA, 5th Fl, TVS Bldg., 409 Soi Rohitsook, Pracharat
Bampen Rd., Bangkok 10320, Thailand,
Tel.: (66-2) 6910718-20, Fax (66-2) 6910714, Email: TERRAPER@xxxxxxxxxx