Ethnoecology, Resource Use, Conservation And Development In A ...

around 4,000 km 2 and excluding many areas vital for subsistence. In 1994 the
communities commenced a land use mapping project to substantiate their claims,
presenting the maps thus produced to the government in 1997. Facing a lack of
response on the part of the government, the communities decided to resort to legal
action, which was filed by their legal representatives late in 1998 (Anselmo and
Mackay 1999: 25-36). The outcome of the action in the Guyanese courts is still
pending, and meanwhile other Amerindian groups in Guyana have begun to follow
similar courses of action. Several communities in the Moruca sub-region in the
Northwest District have recently completed a joint land use mapping project
undertaken for the purposes of land use planning and claiming land extension (APA
2000c), and a similar project is now underway in the ‘Deep South’ district of Region
9. (See chapter 3.3.1).
Despite the uncertainty of the indigenous land situation, for many years
violations of Amerindian territories were minimal. Owing to the economic stagnation
that afflicted the country under the Burnham regime during the 1970's and 1980's,
very little attention was directed towards the remote and undeveloped interior areas
of the country. Timber and mineral extraction, the major industrial activities in the
interior, both dwindled almost to extinction (Thomas 1993: 142-6). Guyana's
Amerindians for the most part avoided the atrocities inflicted upon their counterparts
elsewhere in the Americas in the name of development over this period, and can
currently be considered better off than many in neighbouring Brazil and Venezuela
(e.g., Foster 1990; Cleary 1990; MacMillan 1995: 122-126). It is clear that this was
not due to any measure of government benevolence. A plan for a major hydro-electric
power project on the Mazaruni river, whose expediency was questionable but which
would have seen the Akawaio residents of the region forcibly removed from their
lands (Bennett and Colson 1981) failed to materialise only because the requisite
funds could not be secured. However, in many areas Amerindian communities
received little outside attention other than from missionaries, and were left more or
less free to maintain their lifestyles as they chose, within the constraints already
observed.
In the years since the death of former dictator Forbes Burnham in 1985, the
national situation has changed markedly. The highly despotic and bureaucratic
command economy constructed by Burnham has been transformed as a result of a
series of interventions led by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
One consequence of this is unprecedented levels of pressure upon the natural
resources of Guyana's interior and new risks to its inhabitants, particularly as a result