A report published today by Survival International confirms that some of the world’s last uncontacted Indians have been fleeing from Peru to Brazil in order to escape illegal logging.
The report details evidence found by employees of the Brazilian government’s Indian Affairs Department (FUNAI) since 2004. The evidence consists of numerous sightings of the Indians and includes photos of arrows belonging to them and houses built by them. It also includes mahogany boards which have floated past the FUNAI team’s protection post on the remote Envira River, coming downriver from Peru where uncontacted Indians are known to live.
‘(There has been a) forced migration of autonomous groups in Peru, caused by mahogany exploration in the headwaters of the Jurua, Purus and Envira (rivers in Peru),’ says Jose Carlos Meirelles, head of the FUNAI team, in the report. ‘The collection of arrows (belonging to the Indians) on my table is piling up. . . The situation will only be resolved when the Indians are left alone on the other side of the border.’
Download Survival's new report
(.pdf format)
Loggers have illegally invaded the uncontacted Indians’ land in Peru in search of some of the last commercially-viable mahogany trees in the world. They are often armed and expose the Indians to diseases to which they have no immunity. After loggers forced first contact with members of the Murunahua in 1996, an estimated half of the tribe were wiped out.
Survival’s report urges Peru’s government ‘to protect uncontacted Indians’ land by removing all loggers and prohibiting the entry of any other outsiders and any form of natural resource extraction in areas where they live. . . At present, uncontacted Indians are at huge risk and face extinction.’
http://www.survival-international.org/news/4333
rainforestpower Headline Animator
Showing posts with label peru. Show all posts
Showing posts with label peru. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Monday, January 26, 2009
Conserving a habitat by exploiting it
SAN ANTONIO DE PINTUYACU, Peru: Women in this remote Amazon village can weave fibers from the chambira palm tree branch into almost anything they need - fishing nets, hammocks, purses, skirts, dental floss.
But for the past year they have put their hopes in baskets, weaving thousands to build inventory for export to the United States. Their first international buyers are the San Diego Natural History Museum and San Diego Zoo, and they plan to sell to other museums and home décor purveyors like the Field Museum in Chicago and Cost Plus.
The circuitous route these baskets have taken from the jungle to American store shelves started with a bird watcher's passion for natural habitats, passed through a regional government whose policies have become increasingly more environmental, and, supporters say, should end with better lives for the weavers and their communities.
The enterprise is one of many ventures here in the Amazon aimed at "productive conservation," a principle that advocates saving the rainforest by transforming it into a renewable economic resource for locals - just as some eco-tourism lodges and other ventures in places like Africa and Southeast Asia have tried to do.
The greatest challenge has been persuading residents of the communities along the river, who until now largely supported themselves by chopping down palm branches and fishing, that conservation is in their best interest.
The government of Loreto, Peru's densely forested and least populous state, organized the basket project, which is financed by grants from two nonprofit organizations, Nature and Culture International and the Moore Foundation.
"Having the government take such a role in a market-based approach is quite novel," said Amy Rosenthal, deputy director for projects with Amazon Conservation, a nonprofit that works in southern Peru and northern Bolivia, when told of the program. She said the state of Amazonas in Brazil had attempted a similar conservation-exploitation program. "It sounds like a well-thought-out program and something that could be wildly successful," she said.
But not without challengers.
Ivan Vasquez, the president of Loreto state, said he had made some enemies by supporting conservation in a region where fishing and logging have been the primary engines of revenue for decades and where oil and natural gas are seen as the next frontiers. He called himself "the Quixote of the Amazon."
"We are part of nature. When we destroy nature, we destroy ourselves," Vasquez said. He said big logging operations, not small farmers, continued to pose the greatest deforestation threat.
The changes in Loreto may correspond to a broader shift in Peru's attitude toward conservation. Last spring, the country set up an environment ministry, which has already started focusing on deforestation.
The basket project is the brainchild of Noam Shany, an Israeli agronomist and entrepreneur. A bird-watching trip in 2005 led him to a remote village on the Tahuayo River, an Amazon tributary. There, he said, he noticed striking local baskets for sale in a tourist lodge and thought, "That's some interesting weaving."
Shany, who had previously sold fake plants to Wal-Mart and cacti to nurseries in California and Australia, decided to put his retailing experience to an environmental use. He had come to Peru in 2002 to study exotic birds. Now, he wanted to protect their habitats, and the baskets were the perfect anchor for a productive conservation program.
In 2006, he helped found Procrel, a biodiversity program that has worked with the regional government to establish three vast protected reserves. The basket program is one of several conservation initiatives meant to help indigenous peoples benefit from the conservation efforts.
On the sales side, pitching Peruvian handicrafts to retailers in the United States was easy. "These baskets represent so much more than simply a basket," said Nancy Stevens, manager of retail and wholesale operations for the San Diego Museum of Natural History. "When I began to hear their story - from a local project into a story of sustainability, where they're being developed as a responsible use of the natural resources of this Amazon region - it just clicked so beautifully with the mission of this museum."
Pitching an international enterprise to the villagers was almost as easy. Shany turned a somewhat haphazard local craft - women making a few baskets, selling them in a local shop, then making a few more - into something more like mass production, with higher returns to the producers.
Artisans get between $10 and $12 for each basket, which sells for $40 in the United States. About a third of that goes into shipping and distribution, and the rest is retailer profit, meaning the company that sells the baskets gets a little more per unit than each maker. Procrel and Shany get nothing.
The artisan's cut may not seem substantial, Shany said, but it more than doubles previous monthly earnings. Two years ago, households in this region earned as little as $30 a month selling fish and palm frond roofing, he said. Today, experienced weavers can earn $100 a month.
Over time, urban Peruvian employees of the program have brought a whole new vocabulary to the river communities. Visiting every few weeks, they encourage the weavers to respect deadlines, quality control and inventory requests. On one such recent trip, Shany delivered a pep talk to his newest recruits, preparing them for the orders that could start coming in.
"These stores don't buy one hundred baskets," he said. "One hundred is nothing. Two hundred is nothing. They buy a thousand, ten thousand. You're all going to need to work together."
Since starting the program, he said the weavers have not been able to meet demand. "We can't keep up with the orders," Shany wrote in a recent e-mail message. "We are training more ladies to increase production and also to involve more people."
Rosenthal noted that there were considerable difficulties with any start-up operation like this, not the least of which was falling demand for all kinds of discretionary spending on the part of U.S. consumers as the recession in the country deepened.
Other than that, "quality assurance is probably their biggest challenge for selling something retail in the U.S.," she said. The arrangement, if successful, "can bring them much better profits and a much better source of income than in local terms."
Still, Trevor Stevenson, executive co-director of the Amazon Alliance, a nonprofit organization that focuses on indigenous populations, said it was vital for communities to diversify their income and not to count exclusively on crafts, which could be volatile, particularly in times like these.
The challenge has been teaching the river communities to shift mentalities from consumption to conservation, on a large scale.
"Here, today is today," Shany said. "Tomorrow is another day. It's an immediate mentality, so replanting, and not cutting the tree in the first place, is really revolutionary."
Eblis Chavez, from San Antonio de Pintuyacu, a village of Iquito Indians that is two days by motorboat from the nearest city, said residents had been slowly won over.
"We hesitated a bit originally," Chavez said, "but it makes much more sense to preserve the trees."
A year ago, villagers walked for hours to find irapay palms, whose fronds are used for the ubiquitous thatched roofs sold at markets, because they had chopped all the closer trees. "We were slaves of the irapay," Chavez said.
Since January of last year, villagers have planted chambira groves 10 minutes away, where young fibers used for basketweaving are ready for harvesting every six months.
The baskets are bringing staples, and stability, to the area. "Already, there's more money changing hands. Already we're buying more from the bodegas. Rice, sugar, soap," said Erika Catashunga, of Esperanza, another village, speaking by communal telephone.
Catashunga, 25, is now at the forefront of another venture. She has just received the first business license granted to a basket weaver with Procrel, establishing her as the manager of a nine-village "empresa comunal," or communal enterprise. Its name is Mi Esperanza, or My Hope.
Growing up, she never imagined she would manage a global business one day. "Not even in my dreams," she said.
http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=19225765
But for the past year they have put their hopes in baskets, weaving thousands to build inventory for export to the United States. Their first international buyers are the San Diego Natural History Museum and San Diego Zoo, and they plan to sell to other museums and home décor purveyors like the Field Museum in Chicago and Cost Plus.
The circuitous route these baskets have taken from the jungle to American store shelves started with a bird watcher's passion for natural habitats, passed through a regional government whose policies have become increasingly more environmental, and, supporters say, should end with better lives for the weavers and their communities.
The enterprise is one of many ventures here in the Amazon aimed at "productive conservation," a principle that advocates saving the rainforest by transforming it into a renewable economic resource for locals - just as some eco-tourism lodges and other ventures in places like Africa and Southeast Asia have tried to do.
The greatest challenge has been persuading residents of the communities along the river, who until now largely supported themselves by chopping down palm branches and fishing, that conservation is in their best interest.
The government of Loreto, Peru's densely forested and least populous state, organized the basket project, which is financed by grants from two nonprofit organizations, Nature and Culture International and the Moore Foundation.
"Having the government take such a role in a market-based approach is quite novel," said Amy Rosenthal, deputy director for projects with Amazon Conservation, a nonprofit that works in southern Peru and northern Bolivia, when told of the program. She said the state of Amazonas in Brazil had attempted a similar conservation-exploitation program. "It sounds like a well-thought-out program and something that could be wildly successful," she said.
But not without challengers.
Ivan Vasquez, the president of Loreto state, said he had made some enemies by supporting conservation in a region where fishing and logging have been the primary engines of revenue for decades and where oil and natural gas are seen as the next frontiers. He called himself "the Quixote of the Amazon."
"We are part of nature. When we destroy nature, we destroy ourselves," Vasquez said. He said big logging operations, not small farmers, continued to pose the greatest deforestation threat.
The changes in Loreto may correspond to a broader shift in Peru's attitude toward conservation. Last spring, the country set up an environment ministry, which has already started focusing on deforestation.
The basket project is the brainchild of Noam Shany, an Israeli agronomist and entrepreneur. A bird-watching trip in 2005 led him to a remote village on the Tahuayo River, an Amazon tributary. There, he said, he noticed striking local baskets for sale in a tourist lodge and thought, "That's some interesting weaving."
Shany, who had previously sold fake plants to Wal-Mart and cacti to nurseries in California and Australia, decided to put his retailing experience to an environmental use. He had come to Peru in 2002 to study exotic birds. Now, he wanted to protect their habitats, and the baskets were the perfect anchor for a productive conservation program.
In 2006, he helped found Procrel, a biodiversity program that has worked with the regional government to establish three vast protected reserves. The basket program is one of several conservation initiatives meant to help indigenous peoples benefit from the conservation efforts.
On the sales side, pitching Peruvian handicrafts to retailers in the United States was easy. "These baskets represent so much more than simply a basket," said Nancy Stevens, manager of retail and wholesale operations for the San Diego Museum of Natural History. "When I began to hear their story - from a local project into a story of sustainability, where they're being developed as a responsible use of the natural resources of this Amazon region - it just clicked so beautifully with the mission of this museum."
Pitching an international enterprise to the villagers was almost as easy. Shany turned a somewhat haphazard local craft - women making a few baskets, selling them in a local shop, then making a few more - into something more like mass production, with higher returns to the producers.
Artisans get between $10 and $12 for each basket, which sells for $40 in the United States. About a third of that goes into shipping and distribution, and the rest is retailer profit, meaning the company that sells the baskets gets a little more per unit than each maker. Procrel and Shany get nothing.
The artisan's cut may not seem substantial, Shany said, but it more than doubles previous monthly earnings. Two years ago, households in this region earned as little as $30 a month selling fish and palm frond roofing, he said. Today, experienced weavers can earn $100 a month.
Over time, urban Peruvian employees of the program have brought a whole new vocabulary to the river communities. Visiting every few weeks, they encourage the weavers to respect deadlines, quality control and inventory requests. On one such recent trip, Shany delivered a pep talk to his newest recruits, preparing them for the orders that could start coming in.
"These stores don't buy one hundred baskets," he said. "One hundred is nothing. Two hundred is nothing. They buy a thousand, ten thousand. You're all going to need to work together."
Since starting the program, he said the weavers have not been able to meet demand. "We can't keep up with the orders," Shany wrote in a recent e-mail message. "We are training more ladies to increase production and also to involve more people."
Rosenthal noted that there were considerable difficulties with any start-up operation like this, not the least of which was falling demand for all kinds of discretionary spending on the part of U.S. consumers as the recession in the country deepened.
Other than that, "quality assurance is probably their biggest challenge for selling something retail in the U.S.," she said. The arrangement, if successful, "can bring them much better profits and a much better source of income than in local terms."
Still, Trevor Stevenson, executive co-director of the Amazon Alliance, a nonprofit organization that focuses on indigenous populations, said it was vital for communities to diversify their income and not to count exclusively on crafts, which could be volatile, particularly in times like these.
The challenge has been teaching the river communities to shift mentalities from consumption to conservation, on a large scale.
"Here, today is today," Shany said. "Tomorrow is another day. It's an immediate mentality, so replanting, and not cutting the tree in the first place, is really revolutionary."
Eblis Chavez, from San Antonio de Pintuyacu, a village of Iquito Indians that is two days by motorboat from the nearest city, said residents had been slowly won over.
"We hesitated a bit originally," Chavez said, "but it makes much more sense to preserve the trees."
A year ago, villagers walked for hours to find irapay palms, whose fronds are used for the ubiquitous thatched roofs sold at markets, because they had chopped all the closer trees. "We were slaves of the irapay," Chavez said.
Since January of last year, villagers have planted chambira groves 10 minutes away, where young fibers used for basketweaving are ready for harvesting every six months.
The baskets are bringing staples, and stability, to the area. "Already, there's more money changing hands. Already we're buying more from the bodegas. Rice, sugar, soap," said Erika Catashunga, of Esperanza, another village, speaking by communal telephone.
Catashunga, 25, is now at the forefront of another venture. She has just received the first business license granted to a basket weaver with Procrel, establishing her as the manager of a nine-village "empresa comunal," or communal enterprise. Its name is Mi Esperanza, or My Hope.
Growing up, she never imagined she would manage a global business one day. "Not even in my dreams," she said.
http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=19225765
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Peru tribe battles oil giant over pollution
It is a familiar story. Big business moves into a pristine wilderness and starts destroying the environment and by turn the livelihoods of the indigenous people who live there.
But in a reversal of plot, there are now cases of people living traditional lifestyles who are now invading the territory of the big companies and taking them on at their own game.
The story of the Achuar tribe living in the Amazon rainforest of north-eastern Peru is one of them.
Last year, they filed a class action lawsuit against oil giant Occidental Petroleum, in Los Angeles.
Now they are awaiting a judge's decision on whether the case can proceed in the US or will be sent back to Peru, where it stands little chance of coming to court.
'No credible data
The Achuar people, who have lived for thousands of years in the rainforest, allege that the company contaminated their territory during more than 30 years of oil drilling, making their people sick, even causing some to die, and damaging their land and livelihoods beyond repair.
Occidental Petroleum, which pulled out of Peru eight years ago, denies liability in the case.
It has responded, saying: "We are aware of no credible data of negative community health impacts resulting from Occidental's operations in Peru."
The oil bonanza began in Peru almost 40 years ago when many foreign companies were given an open invitation by successive governments to test and drill in the Amazon.
What they did not consider was the devastating impact it would have on the native people, principally the Achuar - their land, their livelihood and their health.
The Achuar's spiritual leader, Tomas Maynas, wears a bright red headdress made of toucan feathers, and has red war paint streaked on his face. He is the plaintiff in the suit against the company.
He remembers how everything changed when the oil companies arrived. He says the animals ran away, the fish died and their crops started to wilt.
"The Peruvian state just wants to extract as much oil as they can from our land. They've made millions of dollars but we haven't seen it here.
"We know there's wealth here and there'll be more drilling so the state will keep on killing us. But sometimes, when there is pressure, the state gives in."
The lawsuit alleges Occidental Petroleum ignored industry standards and employed out-of-date practices, dumping around 9bn barrels of toxic waste water into streams and rivers over 30 years.
After Occidental left, its operations were taken over by Pluspetrol.
Pluspetrol agreed to change practices in late 2006 when the Achuar, after repeated attempts to negotiate, took direct action.
Shotguns and spears
Many of the older Achuar men once fought in tribal wars with their neighbours, now they finally had the chance to hit their elusive new enemies where it hurt - in their pockets.
Peacefully, yet armed with shotguns and spears, they occupied and held the Amazon oil wells in October 2006.
The ecosystem is the genetic bank of the Amazon...that is our capital, the genetic bank that we have to preserve for humanity, and for the world
Ivan Vasquez
Loreto regional president
The government and the company, losing millions of dollars a day, were forced to come to the negotiating table.
The Achuar came away with a commitment from Pluspetrol to reduce contamination and to pay millions of dollars to clean up and establish a 10-year health plan.
It was thanks to help from outside but also a new generation of indigenous leaders who are learning how to protect their rights in the modern world.
"A whole generation had their health damaged. How can we keep quiet as our parents did?" asks 29-year-old Petronila Chumpi.
"We can't allow this, we're a new generation, we know how to read and write and we have to help our people because they didn't have the knowledge to defend themselves against the oil companies. But now we do."
Improvement
Even on a fast motorboat, Trompeteros is a long day's journey up three rain-swollen rivers from Loreto's regional capital, Iquitos. A hamlet of some 3,000 people, it is situated right opposite Block Eight, one of the main oil wells.
Local people say there is still contamination and oil spills, but now the Achuar have GPS transceivers to log the problems where they find them.
Little by little there are signs of improvement.
But there is frustration on the part of Pluspetrol, which has pledged to pay millions of dollars, that the government is not playing a bigger role.
"This oil industry should be of benefit for everybody - maybe today it's not of benefit to indigenous people and the government should find the best way to solve that problem," says Roberto Ramallo, general manager of Pluspetrol Norte.
But the problem is that the Achuar and other tribes live on top of potentially enormous reserves of crude oil.
Thanks to an intense drive to auction it off, almost three-quarters of the Peruvian Amazon is leased for oil exploration and extraction.
High global demand and the price of oil is also making companies look at the Peruvian Amazon as an attractive prospect, but is it sustainable?
"All of this petroleum exploration in the Amazon is a grand experiment," says Bill Powers of E-Tech, a not-for-profit engineering firm.
"It's just coming into the jungle, developing the resource, getting the economic benefit and historically it's been whatever happens to whoever was there before, happens.
"There's no plan, there's no effort made to ensure that they maintain their cultural integrity or that they have something to do once the rivers and the forest don't provide what they used to provide."
Future plans
Carbon trading schemes have yet to reach this part of the Amazon and the oil boom is not the only threat.
President Alan Garcia has proposed privatising large areas of the rainforest, but local officials say the government in Lima does not understand the impact this would have.
The regional president of Loreto, Ivan Vasquez, says the Amazon needs to preserve its diversity at all costs.
"The ecosystem is the genetic bank of the Amazon, as it brings together genetic matrices which don't exist anywhere else - thousands of interconnected genetic bases.
"That is our capital, the genetic bank that we have to preserve for humanity, and for the world."
The Achuar have so far rejected new oil exploration on their territory.
Their story is an emblematic case of resistance for indigenous Amazonians and is unprecedented in Peru.
But the Peruvian rainforest, the biggest stretch of Amazon outside Brazil, is still the focus of the relentless global hunt to find new sources of fossil fuels.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7306639.stm
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
