Development Aggression as Economic Growth: A Report by the Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact

Development aggression through state, public-private partnerships and corporate projects – large dams, mines, logging, plantations, national parks… and the like – are displacing millions of indigenous peoples from their lands and territories… their traditional sources of subsistence, distinct cultures and ways of life. Indigenous peoples in their resource-rich lands are considered dispensable collateral damage in the name of national development or economic growth. Their individual and collective rights are systematically violated, resulting to their increasing marginalization, exclusion and invisibility. When they resist, they are considered anti-development and even criminals.

As the world leaders meet in Rio in Brazil to discuss sustainable development, back home, indigenous peoples in Asia continued to be displaced, their communities militarized, their homelands submerged, deforested and grabbed, their practices of and expertise on sustainable development trivialized and vilified and their societies on the verge of extinction – all in the name of development.

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