National
Parks and Poverty Risks:
Is
Population Resettlement the Solution?
Prof. Michael M. Cernea
(CGIAR/George Washington University, USA)[1]
&
Dr. Kai Schmidt-Soltau
(Yaoundé/Cameroon)[2]
________________________Table
of Contents_______________________________
I. Introduction................................................................................................................. 3
II.
“Double Sustainability” and the State of our Knowledge......................................... 3
III. The Impoverishment Risks Model and Conservation-Caused
Displacements..... 7
a) Facing the risk of landlessness................................................................................... 12
b) Facing the risk of joblessness (loss of income and subsistence)................................... 14
c) Facing the risk of homelessness................................................................................. 16
d) Facing the risk of marginalisation............................................................................... 16
e) Facing the risk of food insecurity................................................................................ 16
f) Facing the risk of increased morbidity and mortality.................................................... 17
g) Facing the risk of loss of access to common property................................................. 17
h) Facing the risk of social disarticulation........................................................................ 18
IV. Findings from Park Studies in East Africa............................................................ 19
V. Facing New Risks of Biodiversity Loss: How the Displacements
Backfire....... 22
VI. Are Remedies to Forced Displacement
Feasible?................................................ 24
VII: Bibliography........................................................................................................... 27
Abstract
Is the dilemma between biodiversity
conservation and poverty reduction insoluble? This dilemma frequently arises
in park creation programs, when the intended park areas are inhabited by
poor indigenous populations. Advocated “solutions” have often been cast in
“either-or” terms, with a long entrenched bias against resident or mobile
people in parks. Very often, the intervention pattern is the wholesale
treatment of land as state property, denial of customary ownership and
indigenous traditional rights to land and assets, and the forced displacement
of people. It is imperative to re-examine and confront this dilemma through
integrated social and biological research apt to lead to socially improved
conservation policies and interventions. Solutions are needed for achieving
“double sustainability” for both: peoples’ livelihood and biodiversity. The
recent WSSD recommendation that 10% of the planet’s land area should be
protected as national parks increases the urgency of joint social and
biological research.
In this light, the
paper brings empirical evidence from 12 detailed park case-studies carried out
in 6 countries of the Congo-basin ecosystem of Central Africa and also analyzes
convergent from the scientific literature, generated by field research in East
Africa or elsewhere. The creation of national parks in the heart of the
rainforest has involved forced population displacement. There is no ‘no-man's
land’. In the 12 case studies discussed, we found that the strategy to conserve
biodiversity through national parks has displaced many tens of thousands of very
poor park residents, transforming them into conservation-refugees, and has
negatively affected additional large numbers of people as host populations.
The fieldwork
findings are analyzed through the conceptual lens of the Impoverishment Risks and
Reconstruction (IRR) Model, which identifies eight major impoverishment
risks within the displacement or resettlement process: the risks of
landlessness; joblessness; homelessness; marginalization; increased
morbidity/mortality; food insecurity; loss of access to common property
resources; and social disarticulation. Research found that if parks achieve
additional degrees of conservation, part of the cost is paid in the coin of
additional impoverishment for the people uprooted from their habitat and not
resettled in a sustainable manner.; in turn, the ecological impacts on parks
and surrounding forests are a mixture of positive and negative effects, at
least partly defeating the conservation purposes. Comparisons with research
findings from other parts of the developing world on the conservation-induced
displacement of indigenous people reinforce our argument.
We argue that the
understanding of the impoverishment risks to people is a sine qua non
pre-requisite for avoiding them and for creatively researching alternative
socially sustainable solutions. Forced displacement as a mainstream park
creation strategy in developing countries is in profound conflict with poverty
reduction. Our analysis of forced displacements found that such displacements cannot and must not be counted upon any
longer as a general and mainstream solution.
Summing up decades
of experiences with the population displacement approach, we argue that this
strategy has exhausted its potential and its credibility, produced much damage,
did not fulfill the expectations placed on it, and compromised the very cause
of biodiversity and park/forest conservation by inflicting aggravated poverty
on countless people. Therefore, we recommend a change in intervention policies
of governments, donor agencies and international NGOs: the displacement
approach to conservation must be “de-mainstreamed”, in favor of joint
management approaches. Informed by the theoretical framework of the
Impoverishment Risk and Reconstruction (IRR) model and by the World Bank’s and
OECD’s policy standards for involuntary resettlement, we conclude by arguing
for poverty reduction and social sustainability for the conservation-refugees,
and for reconstructive strategies that
secure livelihoods and
development and that enduringly protect the biodiversity.
The question examined in this paper is not whether there should be an
increase in biodiversity conservation, including an increase in protected
areas. There will be and there has to be. Nor is the question, whether people’s
livelihood and rights must be protected and enhanced. They have to be. Nor –
least of all – is it a question of whether these two considerations are
interlocked. They are. The solutions to the dilemmas of protecting both
biodiversity and livelihoods clearly revolve around the ‘how’, not around the
‘whether’. The adequacy and effectiveness of means are under scrutiny.
The present study takes a firm position in support of biodiversity
conservation and analyzes empirical findings that question some of the means
for achieving it. We focus on population displacement processes as a strategic
approach to park creation examine the outcomes, benefits, and risks of this
approach, and propose several research-based recommendations. Since the present
paper is a shortened version of a longer study, we present for discussion only
major aspects, specifically:
·
First, a theoretical framework to analyze the
anatomy of impoverishment risks inherent in forced displacements from parks and
forests.
·
Second, recent empirical findings on
displacements of indigenous groups from 12 parks in Central Africa, compared
with research in other parts of Africa and the developing world.
·
Third, it briefly reviews options, practiced
or proposed, for alternative solutions in the search for a better balance
between biodiversity and social sustainability. The paper formulates
recommendations on
displacement policies and on future research.
The
vexing dilemma between preserving biodiversity and protecting the livelihood of
populations deemed to endanger this biodiversity is neither new, nor easy to
solve. The concept of a “vexing dilemma” is repeated rhetorically as a mantra,
but repeating the mantra is not equal to overcoming the dilemma. Empirical
knowledge has not been available equally about both terms - the
social and the bio-physical - of this dilemma. This asymmetry in information and
knowledge has created a discrepancy, with far reaching effects on policies,
resource allocation, governmental practices, and with pressing demands upon
future scientific interdisciplinary forestry research.
Biological sciences have devoted a broader, deeper
and more systematic research effort than the social sciences for understanding
what is happening when biodiversity is lost, how this occurs, and what
consequences result. Social scientists have not been absent from the debate,
but their analyses of livelihood issues in parks and outside them has been less
systematic and more happenstance (mostly through case reports, but with little
or no syntheses). Social research has not developed a cogent generalized argument
apt to escalate the social issues vested in conservation work at the same
higher policy levels at which biological sciences research had succeeded to
articulate and place their concerns[3].
This has resulted in a perceivable lingering imbalance in the public discourse
about the two sides of the dilemma, in which the social side of the discourse
is left insufficiently linked to the systematic economic, cultural and legal
analysis, statistical evidence and operational policy argument.
The upshot of this imbalance is that the solutions proposed on either
side of the dilemma are, in turn, one-sided, and thus also imbalanced. They
tend to be clearer and directly prescriptive on the biological side, and
fuzzier, insufficiently imaginative, and little tested on the social side.
Further, the biological concerns have gained policy backing and financial
resources toward their practical implementation (park establishment) while the
recommendations made by social research remained both under-designed and
woefully under-resourced (Cernea, 1999; Schmidt-Soltau 2002a).
Today, research is
called upon to face the simultaneous challenges
of ‘double sustainability’ – both biodiversity and socio-economic. Real
sustainability must be concomitantly ecological and social. This is a major
challenge for policies, for practice and for research. We address this
challenge in the present paper in terms of the relationship between goals and
means.
Research on biodiversity and forests must aim
at finding integrated solutions for conservation, poverty reduction and
improved livelihood, rather than pursuing such objectives separately. This
integrated pursuit of two-fold sustainability was adequately captured by CIFOR
in a newly proposed research program:
‘The
Challenge arises from two persistent, interlinked problems of overwhelming
importance: rural poverty in the tropics and the continuing loss of unique
forest ecosystems. The problems are
dauntingly complex: the search for solutions must be linked to attain a workable mix of conservation and
development at large spatial scales. The opportunity is to enhance
the production systems and expand the diversity of livelihood options available
to poor people in forest landscapes while maintaining environmental functions
and conserving biodiversity’ (CIFOR 2002 - emphasis added. We note that IUCN
and WWF co-sponsor this important joint program submitted for approval and
financing to CGIAR and international donors)
It is indeed most important to centrally
place the poverty issues, not only the biological and other technical issues,
on the agro-forestry research map. This is why. The important principle is that
workable solutions to the challenge of conserving the rainforest must be sound
on both biodiversity and social/poverty grounds. Solutions that reduce
biodiversity would not be acceptable as strategies for poverty reduction and,
conversely, solutions that aggravate poverty would be unacceptable as means for
preserving biodiversity. This is fundamentally relevant to the argument
we develop in the present paper.
Examining
population displacement as a ‘means’ for protecting biodiversity through parks,
we have found through both prima facie field research in Africa and secondary
analysis of empirical findings worldwide – that involuntary displacement as
currently practiced does not reduce existing poverty: on the contrary, it
aggravates the poverty of affected indigenous people. Conservation benefits,
however, cannot be paid for in the coin of increased impoverishment. Therefore,
we argue in this paper for a profound reconsideration of population
displacement issues, means, and validity, and for a sound increase of
biodiversity conservation efforts through alternative means of improved
co-management approaches.
|
Preventing
a Major Population Displacement: Forest
People in Cote d’Ivoire The Government of the Cote d’Ivoire had submitted a few years ago a
request to the World Bank for a forestry-sector project. The project was
intended to prepare and introduce forest management plans for several high
priority forest areas, strengthen institutionally the Ministry of Agriculture
and Forestry, and facilitate what was described as (doubtfully) sustainable
commercial exploitation of the forest. During the appraisal, the possibility
of resettlement operations came up, as part of a wider set of measures to
demarcate limits and improve surveillance and management of 1.5 mil ha of
gazetted forests, protect the Comoé National Park, expand infrastructure,
improve logging and the log export system, expand new plantation, and other
measures. For the resettlement
operations, the Government undertook to carry out detailed demographic and
land-use studies, detailed study and mapping of the potential resettlement
areas within or outside the gazetted forests, ‘implementation of a
resettlement plan giving beneficiaries a land area at least equal in size and
production potential to the production unit eliminated’ (World Bank 1990:
48). Only late, did the authorities inform the World Bank about the
full size of the intended displacement - estimated at about 200,000 people -
after having understated it previously.
The Bank rejected this proposal, and sought and received agreement on
a different approach to resettlement, congruent with Bank policy, which would
reduce displacement from about 200,000 to less than 40,000; provide better
conditions for resettlers; consolidate existing scattered populations into ‘agro-forestry
zones’ within the legal limits of classified forest; and integrate resettlers
into forest management general plans.
This approach was new for Côte d’Ivoire and was not considered before
the Bank-assisted project. What could
have been a massive and violent uprooting for tens of thousands of people was
averted and was placed on a totally different track at project appraisal. During
implementation, however, the Bank’s regular supervision mission had to
constantly oppose the attempts of the Ministry to still proceed to displacement without the
safeguard measures agreed upon, without the planned studies, and without
having earmarked any areas equal in size and production capacity, as promised
at the outset by the Government. Despite continuous requests over several
years by the Bank, the Government did not adopt a formal policy on sound
resettlement. At least, however, the displacements were prevented due to the
Bank’s firm opposition based on the legal agreement signed for this project
and due to regular monitoring missions. By the end of the project, seven
years later, the Completion Implementation Report indicated that only 100
people were displaced, instead of the Government’s intended 200,000
people. The Completion Report did not
provide any evidence that the de facto cancellation of the initially intended
displacement plans, and even of the reduced plans agreed with the World Bank,
has had the negative effects which were announced and were used to justify
the planning of massive displacement.
After 1997 data are not available. But indications exist that massive
commercial logging has significantly expanded in Cote d’Ivoire’s forests,
with likely more adverse effects on forest conservation than the impact of
the residing forest inhabitants. (cf. World Bank 1990, 1996, 1997). |
In Central Africa – the area of
this paper’s empirical investigations -, governmental institutions, bilateral
governmental agencies and international agencies adopted strategies to protect
as much undisturbed forest as possible (Weber et al 2001, CARPE 2001, Ribot 1999). The aggregated data of table 1 fully support the
estimates by IUCN and CIFOR on the urgency of counteracting forest degradation
and loss. On average, 60 % of the tropical forest and 60 % of the wildlife
habitat have been destroyed. The
Yaoundé Declaration of 1999, ratified by 7 Central African heads of state
expresses the consensus that the establishment of national parks and other
protected areas in this sub-region is the most effective instrument to protect nature
(Sommet 1999). By 2002 the Central African heads of state had fulfilled their
promises made in the Yaoundé Declaration and nearly doubled the surface area of
protected forests in the region.
While
the 2002 WSSD in Johannesburg just maintained the goal that 10 % of all land
should be protected, the heads of states in the Central African sub-region came
up with the plan that in 10 years time not less than 30 % of the landmass of
their states will be protected as national parks (COMIFAC 2002).
Table 1: Deforestation and
protection indicators in the Congo basin countries[4]
|
Country |
Total Area km2 |
Original Tropical Forest in km2 |
Remaining Tropical Forest
(1992) km2 |
Forest Loss (%) |
Remaining wildlife habitat (1995) km2 |
Habitat loss (%) |
Protected Forest (1994) km2 |
Protected Forest (2002)
km2 |
Protected Forests (2002) (% of
remaining forest) |
Population Density (1995) people/ km2 |
|
Cameroon |
475,440 |
376,900 |
155,330 |
59 |
192,000 |