By William H. Wiist
Because the corporate goal is to obtain the highest profit possible, not social welfare, public health or environmental sustainability, business interests often give little or no consideration to the effects of corporate practices on indigenous peoples. Thus, the estimated 257 to 370 million indigenous peoples in about 5,000 communities in 70 countries, speaking 5,000 of the 6,000 existing languages, often experience severe detrimental consequences from commercial activity. The effects of extractive industries such as mining, agricultural crops and timber, and the theft of intellectual property rights illustrate some of those consequences.
Extractive industries
In many parts of the world, indigenous people inhabit areas that have been identified as areas with abundant resources that are in demand as profitable ventures for global industries:
Forests for the logging industry; oil and gas for exploration and drilling industries; gold and other minerals for mining companies and agriculture; use of the land for mono crop farming such as tobacco, palm oil, coffee, rubber; dams on indigenous land to create lakes or use of rivers to produce electrical energy; and nature reserves established in areas where they displace the indigenous peoples living there.
These extractions are reminiscent of early European appropriation of the Americas under the concept of “terra nulius” that is, land not belonging to anyone, and therefore available for the taking, even though millions of indigenous peoples had inhabited an area for thousands of years prior to European explorations.
The various extractive industries have several effects in common relative to indigenous peoples: [1]
1. The industrial operations displace indigenous people from their ancestral homes and land which have been integral to their spiritual, physical, mental and emotional life, requiring indigenous people to move to other remote but unfamiliar areas, or to migrate to the unsanitary, unhealthful fringes of urban areas with unlikely means of earning a decent livelihood. As a result the indigenous people experience social disorganization in their relationships to each other, and disruption of their relations with other indigenous group. They are forced to interact in new and unfamiliar settings with unfamiliar types of people, practices and ways of behavior.
2. This displacement, dispersion and migration leads to loss of their language and culture.
3. Their ancestral land may be confiscated with no or little financial remuneration for the land or for the extracted substance.
4. With loss of land, they lose their traditional livelihood, subsistence farming or place for gathering food and traditional medicinal plants.
5. Their sacred land or water be polluted by the extractive operations.
6. Contacts with extractive industry workers may expose the indigenous peoples to new diseases that they then transmit to their families, neighbors and other groups of indigenous peoples.
The Case of the Nahua and Nati Peoples in Peru
Napolitano described a 20 year history of an indigenous peoples’ contact with extractive industries within a territorial reserve the government established for four groups of indigenous people in an isolated area of the Amazon River. [2] Logging of mahogany and cedar, and oil operations in or near the area during the 1970s and 1980s led to some violence against the industry operations, some displacement of one indigenous group, and interethnic clashes between groups. In about 2001, work began on a gas field concession granted by the Peruvian government, 75 percent of which was within the territorial reserve.
Loggers working in an area of the Amazon encountered members of the Nahua indigenous group. Some of the Nahua went down river and interacted with the loggers. Upon their return up river, epidemics, including pneumonia, compli