The era of evicting indigenous people from ancestral lands to make way for protected nature areas and parks will have to end, conservationists were told last week.
Pygmies, Bedouins and Bushmen, among others, said they would no longer accept being brushed aside by governments and environmentalists in the name of protecting world heritage sites.
Communities that feel betrayed by the conservation movement have mobilised to turn the 10-day World Parks Congress, which opened in Durban last Monday, into a platform for their grievances.
The conference is intended to focus on endangered species and the rise in transfrontier parks, but 120 disgruntled indigenous groups are expected to seize much of the attention.
Since the last conference in Venezuela in 1992 protected areas have doubled in size and now cover about 12% of the Earth’s surface.
Some of the groups who lived in those areas say they have been dispossessed and that they were the more accomplished conservation experts.
”For me that’s the crux of the conference, and it should ensure that communities living around protected areas get their rights back,” said David Grossman, an ecologist who advised the Makuleke community on retrieving land in the Kruger National Park.
A spokesperson for Central African Pygmies said his people shared the plight of other indigenous groups pushed from their land without consultation, with no provision for education and healthcare or respect for traditional rights. Other delegates complained of being forced to become poachers.
Sabbah Eid Zlabiah, representing a Bedouin village in Jordan, said that proclaiming the desert mountain area of Wadi Rum a protected area in 1998 could have ended a way of life had the government not backed down.
The indigenous groups have adopted the Cape Vidal memorandum, calling for landowners to help draft management plans. Among the signatories were the Khomani San.
In his opening address President Thabo Mbeki set an ambitious agenda for the conference. ”Now more than ever we require new knowledge, new ideas, new perspectives and relationships. This congress is charged with generating these.”
Delegates are to compile a list of all the protected areas in the world and agree on a conservation plan for the next 10 years.
”Turning ‘paper parks’ into real parks is one of the big challenges facing the conservation community,” said the union’s president, Yolanda Kakabadse Navarro.
Concern is also growing that the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park agreement, which incorporates chunks of Zimbabwe, South Africa and Mozambique, will suffer from Harare’s controversial policies.
The number of transfrontier parks has more than doubled from 59 in 1988 to 160, but Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism Mohammed Valli Moosa said the proliferation masked worrying economic pressures.
”Who pays for conservation? If national parks have to, on a level playing field, compete for taxpayers’ money with things such as urgent healthcare needs, primary education … then [they] really don’t have much of a future, particularly in the developing world,” he said.
Moosa said the conference, Benefits Beyond Boundaries, recognised that communities living around protected areas should reap economic benefits. — Â