Good article on Hilltribes in Cambodia

A good article on the plight of hilltribe groups in Cambodia caught my eye in the Asia Sentinel. Some key quotes:

Graham Brown, a representative of a non-governmental organization in Cambodia’s Ratanakiri province, believes that the key to tribal survival is land ownership. His group, Community Forestry International, helps tribal people obtain rights to both their traditional forest and farmland.

“In collective cultures, everything is an all-or-nothing proposition. When one goes, they all go. Once people give up hope they will all sell their land.” Once the land is gone, Brown says, the tribes will die out.

Absolutely. What indigenous folks around the world are facing is a challenge over land base, pure and simple. Agriculture is intensive on smaller plots of land, but produces a rise in population, which means that it requires ever-new places to farm. Horticulture and hunting and gathering are extensive, requiring more land for fewer people. This is a conflict that cannot be settled, though it can be mediated a whole hell of a lot better than is happening. Meanwhile, the industrial demands of the so-called “first world” result in the stripping, mining, logging, and poisoning of what land has been left to the indigenous.

According to Dr. Carlos Fernandez, a Filipino anthropologist and tribal expert, “To call tribal people horticulturists is wrong. They are craftsmen. Agriculture is just one of the many tools available to them in their plan for survival. They also use hunting, fishing, gathering, and farming, transplanting jungle products closer to the tribal villages for use when needed. And with this combination of skills, plus weaving and making handicrafts to sell, the tribal people could exist.”

I’m not sure exactly what particular horse Fernandez is beating here: does he feel that horticulture is somehow a negative term, and that ‘craftsmen’ is better? Fine. But he seems to be deeply confused about the difference between horticulture and agriculture.

In the transition to modern society, lowlanders generally force tribal people off the best land, with a typical defense in the face of conflict being to simply push deeper into the forest. Very few tribes in the 21st century are living on the land they once inhabited. With commercial farms and others taking the choice land closest to rivers and oceans, the immediate impact on the tribal diet is they can no longer supplement it through the fishing or river trading.

As their land is squeezed, they also lose their semi-nomadic ways and are forced to remain in one place, where they deplete the soil.

Yep. But this is a general observation, and Your Mileage May Vary. Most crucially, see Chan’s “Survival in the Rainforest,” which complicates and enriches the ‘dependency’ debate greatly.

Graham paints a bleak picture of Cambodia’s Tampuan situation, but it is true of tribal people everywhere.

Again, true. See the recent move to push the people of the Kalahari off their land, ending the longest continuing human form of subsistence in the world.