Baka hunter-gatherer indigenous peoples in Cameroon forced from their land

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) supports conservation zones on the traditional land of the Baka hunter-gatherer indigenous peoples. According to Survival International Baka wild collectors and hunters are denied access, abused, and even murdered by anti-poaching squads when they hunt, forage or visit their sacred sites. 

Survival has submitted a formal complaint to the OECD accusing WWF of supporting anti-poaching agents to drive the Baka from large areas of their ancestral land. Survival claims that thousands of tribal people have been dispossessed and mistreated through WWF projects.

Cases like these raise the importance of agreements such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and conservation mechanisms such as the IUCN Sustainable Use and Livelihoods group (SULi) to engage communities as an alternative to the increasingly exclusive and militarized approaches toward conservation.

Further reading and related work at IUCN:

Indigenous culture and conservation of nature in Vietnam https://www.iucn.org/content/indigenous-culture-and-conservation-nature-vietnam

Bayesian Networks for modeling conservation impacts https://www.iucn.org/news/commission-environmental-economic-and-social-policy/201702/bayesian-networks-modeling-conservation-impacts

Decision modeling for trees, nutrition, and livelihoods https://www.iucn.org/news/commission-environmental-economic-and-social-policy/201608/decision-modeling-trees-nutrition-and-livelihoods

Vietnamese song about herbalism

From a manuscript I am working on with traditional healers of North Vietnam:

Bài hát của các Già làng về n ghề t​huốc nam

Nếu bạn là ​bạn của ​cây thuốc
Hãy ​truyền lại từ thế hệ này sang thế hệ sau
Những ​con ​người có trái tim nhân hậu
Họ sẽ trở thành những ​người ​th​ầy thuốc nam

Mọi người đang mong chờ được chữa lành mọi vết thương

Elders song about herbalism 

If you are herbal friends 

Passed down from generation to generation 

Kind hearted 

Kind person to become a herbalist 

People are waiting to be healed 

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Here is a regularly updated list of other things Cory writes

Slow Food and Indigenous People

Last month at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII) 'Right to Food and Food Sovereignty' session, Slow Food President Carlo Petrini gave Slow Food's perspective. 


He said "For twenty-five years now, Slow Food has sought to preserve agricultural and food biodiversity as a tool for ensuring a future for our planet and humanity as a whole," ... "it would be senseless to defend biodiversity without also defending the cultural diversity of peoples and their right to govern their own territories. The right of peoples to have control over their land, to grow food, to hunt, fish and gather according to their own needs and decisions, is inalienable. This diversity is the greatest creative force on earth, the only condition possible for the maintenance and transmission of an outstanding heritage of knowledge to future generations."



Slow Food is working to support Indigenous communities through the Foundation for Biodiversity projects and Terra Madre network of food communities to reintroduce local food products. Slow Food also works with the Indigenous Partnership for Agrobiodiversity and Food Sovereignty, a network of Indigenous communities and organizations committed to defining their own food and agricultural practices that sustain agrobiodiversity, assisted by scientists and policy researchers.


In 2011, Slow Food International along with Slow Food Sweden and Slow Food Sápmi organized the first Indigenous Terra Madre meeting in Jokmokk, Sweden, a second is planned for 2014 in India.



Cambodian indigenous minorities from Ratanakkiri

The artwork, and personal reflections about the environment, of 12 indigenous children from Ratanakkiri went on display last Tuesday at Meta House in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The children attended the opening and were accompanied by several elders. 

50 year old Hoeur Sao, a member of the Kavet indigenous minority, was interviewed by the Phnom Penh Post during the visit and this grabbed my attention. 

The Kavet people live on the outskirts what is now the Virachey National Park, in Ratanakkiri province. This is a typical case of removing indigenous people in order to do 'conservation' - a terrible policy that exacerbates the loss of biodiversity and ensures the loss of the traditional culture that manages that biodiversity. During the interview Hoeur Sao said that growing up "there was a lot of wildlife"..."when we walked to our crop fields, we used to see tigers, deer and crocodiles in front of us. But now, we rarely see them." 

Hoeur Sao said people in her area never raised animals, when they hunted they distributed the meat in the village. Now they are all raising farm animals and practicing more sedentary agriculture. 

"Before, we just dug holes with sticks to grow our crops," she says. "During the Khmer Rouge, they taught us how to plough our soil with buffalo. In the '80s, people began to own buffalos. Now, 90 per cent of our villagers own animals." 

Hoeur Sao said that the disappearance of the wildlife in the jungle around her community is by people from outside.