Funded By Whom?
Isn't there always two sides to every story, each claiming a perception of right or wrong or in-between. Doubts raised that what one hears from one source will be echoed by another? People assert one thing, and others lay claim to a different set of realities than that originally laid bare.It depends, goes that old saying, on whose ox is being gored, perhaps as much as anything. But trying to understand what really lies behind the two conflicting versions of any event or particular set of circumstances can be complex, frustrating and sometimes close to impossible.
There are passionately-activisit charitable groups, NGOs, set up for no purpose other than to protect indigenous peoples in third-world countries from blatant exploitation from developers. People who farm little plots of land in subsistence circumstances, and whom large land-owners pull out all the stops to dispossess them of their lands.
Sometimes those large land-owners are their own governments, eager and determined to lay claim to land rich in mineral deposits, or a geography proving to be a new source of fossil fuel extraction potential.
Then there are all those foreign investors from abroad with expertise and funding, who work overtime to sway governments of third-world and/or emerging economies to agree to combining efforts and profits for the purpose of extracting natural resources to profit the foreign investors and corporations - and just incidentally the handily co-operative government agents whose pledge to their peoples' betterment is swiftly sloughed off.
Just lately, news out of Lima, Peru. That ecologists have photographic evidence of nomadic tribes deep in Peru's Amazon rainforest, whose presence had hitherto not been known. This, at a time, when the world worries about the well-being of native peoples desperately striving to maintain their traditional low-impact way of life, anxious to hold on to their ancestral lands, and strenuously avoiding contact with the world outside.
At a time, concomitantly, when multinational oil corporate interests are champing at the bit to explore the potential riches residing deep in that same jungle. While at the same time a growing awareness of environmental degradation impacting on the quality of life on this globe, imperilling our very existence in the long run, and short-range extending the list of threatened species is a direct and dire reality.
These primitive and hermetic people, content to live in palm-leaf huts and hunt with arrows are elusive, secretive and fearful of detection. Their vulnerability, as a last gasp of an ancient way of life worries the administration of the countries they are a part of, along with international aid and human-rights organizations.
Yet it's difficult for any country with a slowly emerging economy to deny itself and its large population the benefits of modern life. So the government of Peru goes out of its way to encourage foreign oil exploration.
Environmental and Indian-rights groups stand in firm opposition to these governments, particularly in remote jungle areas. So while land is being auctioned off to to the highest bidders for petroleum prospecting, these indigenous people who have long shunned outside-world contact are in danger of losing this protracted battle with modernity.
"The Peruvian government is actively promoting oil and gas exploration in areas where uncontacted tribes live", moan advocacy groups.
For it is not only their traditional ways of life that are imperilled by this unwanted and feared contact. Contracted loggers or oil company workers could expose these hitherto-intact tribes to deadly diseases, much as has happened in the past, in countries around the world. Disease contracted through contact with foreigners who have themselves developed an immunity over generations to diseases their populations normally come in contact with, have had the dreadful effect of halving many Amazon tribal populations.
Little wonder the NGOs are so frantic, so emphatic about the need to protect these elusive, primitive tribes from incursion into their traditional territories. The impact on these people is swiftly deleterious. Not only destroying their valued way of life, but threatening to destroy all vestiges of their ancient populations as well. Yet another threatened species at risk in our steadily evolving environment.
Here's another side to that same story, however. A quarter-page advertisement in my local newspaper on behalf of Federacion Shuar de Zamora Chinchipe. Never heard of them. Who might they conceivably be? Oh, indigenous people from the Amazon Rainforest of Southern Ecuador, in league with the Confederation of Amazonian Ecuadorian Indigenous Nationalities (representing over 220,000 indigenous peoples of Ecuador).
The Shuar people of Southern Ecuador are represented by one of their leaders, Ruben Naichap, who explains that over 95% of the indigenous population lives in crushing poverty on less than two dollars a day. They are aware that their geography is rich with potential, an immense mineral wealth which, as the people of Ecuador, the indigenous people of that country, they feel they are entitled to assist in exploiting as a development tool that will help to bring them out of poverty.
To further educate Canadians on their plight, a meeting was set up, inviting all interested within this nation's capital to attend, titled "The Business of Poverty". Actually the invitation was to "the Canadian people and citizens of Ottawa (the nation's capital). And the invitation's purpose was to alert those interested that the meeting was, specifically, an"invitation to participate in a presentation on 'the Business of Poverty' and the role of Canadian NGOs.
Here's the clincher: "Our way out of poverty is presently under attack from Mining Watch Canada which is a Canadian (Ottawa-based) non-governmental organization that is raising money from the Canadian people to stop our people from having a life with dignity and opportunities. Mining Watch Canada has/is opposing our local communities who openly support responsible mining and mining partnerships with Canadian Mining Companies."
Everything clear now?
Labels: Environment, Justice, Particularities/Peculiarities
posted by Pieface @ Saturday, September 29, 2007
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