Indigenous activists clash with UN over proposed park

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — When farmer May Cho Win learned that a conservation project proposed by the U.N. Development Program in Myanmar would include the land she’s worked for over a decade, the 28-year-old wondered how she and her husband would be able to support their three children.

“Without our land we can’t live,” she told The Associated Press, speaking by phone from her single-room bamboo home. “If they come and do this project, we will have nothing to do — we’ll be like dead people.”

The $21 million “Ridge to Reef” project — funded by the Global Environment Facility with support from the Smithsonian Institute, the Myanmar government and other partners — would conserve nearly 5,500 square miles (14,000 square kilometers) of land, coastline and marine areas in southern Myanmar’s Tanintharyi Region.

But Indigenous and land rights activists say the project will disrupt largely agrarian and fishing-based livelihoods among residents of about 225 villages in the proposed park area. The project – now on hold while the U.N. program’s inspector general investigates their complaints — is but one example of conflicts between well-meaning, top-down conservation efforts and Indigenous peoples.

With increasing development and deforestation across the globe, both international conservation groups and Indigenous activists recognize the importance of protecting lands that provide havens for biodiversity and valuable carbon storage for a warming planet.

Tigers, Asian elephants, tapirs and other endangered species live in what is the largest area of lowland wet evergreen forest remaining in the Indo-Myanmar biodiversity hot spot, as well as some of the largest contiguous blocks of mangrove forest in mainland Southeast Asia.

Yet the region has been environmentally degraded by palm oil...