Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Committee (SOCHUM)

Increased mining activity in Hell’s Gate National Park have slowly
removed he Maasai of Kenya from their native lands.
and are thus left unemployed without their plot of
land to farm.
disregard for indigenous land rights can occur
even when the government is attempting to act in
the best interest of the community. The highlands of
northern Thailand, for example, contain significant
indigenous populations, including the Akh and the
Lisu, who farm rice, maize, and poppy via the slashand-burn
technique, an agricultural method used in
overpopulated and forested regions where there is
not enough arable land. 136 In slash-and-burn farming,
agricultural plots are created through the burning
and cutting of all of vegetation in a certain area.
Because of the indigenous slash-and-burn methods
and significant logging activity, the forests of the
highlands are severely damaged, so the Royal Forest
Department, a body of the Thai government, has
taken ownership of the land and begun a replanting
campaign. 137 In the process of replanting, however,
the Royal Forest Department has eliminated many
farms that the Akh and Lisu were cultivating. None of
the indigenous peoples are Thai citizens, which makes
it extremely difficult for them to retake ownership
of their land at any point. 138 Since their lands have
been taken away, they have seen increased rates of
extreme poverty, HIV/AIDS, and drug addiction. 139
Without access to their traditional farming practices,
which produced enough food for the population to
live on, many Akh and Lisu have been forced to seek
other forms of income, including local wage labor and
jobs in the major cities of Thailand. 140 the conditions
that these migrants live and work in, however, are not
ideal, and, as discussed below, they face significant
discrimination that makes it difficult for them to
find other employment. Others have attempted to
adopt sustainable agricultural practices to prevent
the Thai government from taking away their land,
but since the Thai government is instituting these
changes so rapidly, it is unlikely that the adoption
will be successful. 141 this example illustrates the
challenges that the international community faces
when attempting to assist indigenous populations,
as the actions that benefit them sometimes have
other negative consequences, which, in this case, are
environmental.
Another common example of good government
intentions backfiring is the development of national
parks and its accompanying tourist economy on
indigenous lands. One such case concerns the
Taroko, an indigenous people of Taiwan. Their
territory encompasses the Taroko Gorge, a worldclass
attraction that draws almost two million tourists
annually. Since the founding of the Republic of China
on Taiwan, the government has taken away much of
their land for development projects. The largest land
grab was in 1980, when the government created the
Taroko National Park. Taroko residents were forced to
relocate with limited reparations and were forbidden
from practicing their local customs, including hunting,
fishing, and slash-and-burn agriculture. 142 Many
Taroko left for jobs in the city but found themselves
unemployed with the cutback in industrialization and
importation of foreign labor during the economic
restructuring of the 1990s. Today, the government
of the Republic of China is attempting to convince
the Taroko to begin small businesses in the tourist
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