{"id":2343,"date":"2018-11-02T20:59:40","date_gmt":"2018-11-02T20:59:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/?p=2343"},"modified":"2018-11-02T20:59:40","modified_gmt":"2018-11-02T20:59:40","slug":"displaced-villagers-in-myanmar-at-odds-with-uk-charity-over-land-conservation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/2018\/11\/02\/displaced-villagers-in-myanmar-at-odds-with-uk-charity-over-land-conservation\/","title":{"rendered":"Displaced villagers in Myanmar at odds with UK charity over land conservation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Karen people in Tanintharyi region fear project to protect 800,000-acre area will cut them off from ancestral lands<\/p>\n

A British conservation charity has become embroiled in a row with villagers displaced by civil war in\u00a0Myanmar<\/a>\u00a0over plans to protect pristine forests housing wild Asian elephants, tigers and sun bears.<\/p>\n

Fauna and Flora International (FFI) is helping to finance the $21m (\u00a315.8m)\u00a0ridge to reef project<\/a>, which is led by the UN\u2019s development programme and aims to protect up to 800,000 acres of the country\u2019s south-eastern Tanintharyi region from threats like poachers, loggers and palm oil companies.<\/p>\n

But the project faces widespread opposition from ethnically Karen people who depend on the forests for their livelihoods. They fear it could convert their ancestral lands into protected areas, making it illegal for them to grow crops, fell trees to build homes, or forage and hunt for food.<\/p>\n

And thousands of people displaced by conflict may have trouble resettling their lands in potential protected areas, according to the Conservation Alliance of Tanawtharyi (Cat), a coalition of local environmental groups.<\/p>\n

They say the plan also threatens to upset a fragile 2012 ceasefire agreement between the rebel Karen National Union (KNU) and the Myanmar military because it would bring rebel-held land under government control.<\/p>\n

Frank Momberg, FFI\u2019s Myanmar programme director, said those fears were based on \u201cmisrepresentation and wrong information\u201d about the project. The charity would not support including villagers\u2019 land in protected areas, nor any other plans, without the consent of indigenous people and the KNU, he added.<\/p>\n

Local communities, angry at being left in the dark, are unconvinced. \u201cWhy aren\u2019t they transparent? None of us want this project,\u201d said Tun Naing Oo of Hein Lai village, a remote cluster of about 80 wooden-stilted houses nestled between a range of cloud-capped hills and the swollen Lenya river.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople in Britain giving money to FFI need to learn about the situation on the ground here,\u201d said Daw Sabel, another local.<\/p>\n

Hein Lai is one of 52 villages that could be affected by the project, which would involve training rangers to patrol protected areas equipped with specialist monitoring software.<\/p>\n

Hein Lai\u2019s residents only learned about the ridge to reef scheme, which was officially launched in July, because members of Cat made long journeys along dirt roads to tell them. This, say Cat, amounts to a \u201cserious violation\u201d of villagers\u2019 rights because the project failed to get their free, prior and informed consent.<\/p>\n

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Singay Dorji, a UN development programme official, said the agency remained \u201cfully committed\u201d to obtaining such consent.<\/p>\n

Consulting every village before the start of the project would have been impractical, said Mark Grindley, who manages FFI\u2019s conservation programme in Tanintharyi. The plan was to get consent as needed over the project\u2019s duration, he said.<\/p>\n

But the charity\u2019s staff will no longer be able to travel to Hein Lai and other villages because KNU officials are unlikely to grant them permission, he added. \u201cI don\u2019t think we\u2019d be welcome.\u201d<\/p>\n

The dispute is part of a global pushback against the international conservation movement by forest-dwelling communities.<\/p>\n

The UN special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz,\u00a0said in a July report<\/a>\u00a0that despite \u201ccommitments by the world\u2019s most influential conservation organisations\u201d to respect indigenous rights, \u201clittle has changed\u201d. She cited estimates that\u00a0250,000 people<\/a>\u00a0were forced from their homes, sometimes violently, between 1990 and 2014 after their lands were turned into protected areas.<\/p>\n

Critics of ridge to reef note that there are still sporadic clashes between the KNU\u2019s armed wing and the Myanmar military despite the 2012 ceasefire. That makes it especially irresponsible to push ahead with a model of conservation that has stoked global conflict, they say.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s against the ceasefire agreement,\u201d said Ah Oo, a representative from the KNU\u2019s forestry department, referring to a clause that says the government must consult with rebels on any projects in contested areas that have a \u201cmajor impact on civilians\u201d.<\/p>\n

Many of Hein Lai\u2019s residents settled there after being forced from other villages during fighting. Shwe Thin remembers soldiers setting fire to his childhood home more than 20 years ago. Now, the prospect of protected areas causing territorial disputes makes him and his neighbours uneasy. \u201cThe KNU have not agreed to this project,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Grindley admitted that he and his FFI colleagues are \u201cnot really trained\u201d in conflict sensitivity but said it is something they are \u201cstarting to take on board\u201d.\u00a0<\/strong>He declined to comment on calls by Cat and the KNU to suspend the project until displaced people have returned home and a comprehensive peace agreement has been secured.<\/p>\n

Win Naing Thaw, an official at Myanmar\u2019s environment ministry, dismissed the calls. \u201cIf we wait for the peace process, who can be sure if the tigers and elephants will be left or not?\u201d he said. \u201cIn July, two people killed a tiger in the Lenya area \u2026 we have a video clip.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey oppose the ridge to reef programme, but what is their commitment to preserving nature, the tigers and elephants?\u201d<\/p>\n

But poaching tigers and elephants is already illegal, and campaigners at Cat say it is precisely because of indigenous conservation practices that there is so much pristine forest left to support these animals in the first place. They point to estimates that 80% of the world\u2019s remaining healthy ecosystems are inside indigenous territory. \u201cWithout these communities, the globally important forests of Tanintharyi region would have disappeared long ago,\u201d the group\u00a0said in a report<\/a>\u00a0earlier this year.<\/p>\n

Eh Pa Tha Law, executive director of Tanintharyi Friends, one of Cat\u2019s seven members, said the best hope of protecting the forests lies in giving more control to local communities, and less to the central government or international NGOs. \u201cThere are currently too many consultants,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

That sentiment is shared by villagers in Hein Lai. \u201cThis is our forest and our land,\u201d said Daw Sabel. \u201cWe want to protect it ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Karen people in Tanintharyi region fear project to protect 800,000-acre area will cut them off from ancestral lands A British conservation charity has become embroiled in a row with villagers displaced by civil war in\u00a0Myanmar\u00a0over plans to protect pristine forests housing wild Asian elephants, tigers and sun bears. Fauna and Flora International (FFI) is helping to finance the $21m (\u00a315.8m)\u00a0ridge… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":77,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[35],"class_list":["post-2343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article-post","tag-the-guardian"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/77"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2343"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2343\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2344,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2343\/revisions\/2344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}