Seeking Culprits: Ethnicity and Resource Conflict

Page 1 of 7 Watershed Vol. 3 No. 1 July - October 1997 Seeking Culprits: Ethnicity and Resource Conflict By Philip Hirsch Agents of mainstream development, in examining resource conflict from a distance, have simplified its nature. Upland shifting cultivators are frequently blamed for a wide range of environmental impacts, and conflict over resources is often portrayed as an inter-ethnic conflict. In fact, the apparent ethnic tensions have a more material basis arising from various pressures, and conflicts have a basis in intensified resource use and exploitation. Upland dwelling shifting cultivators have long been the scapegoats for environmental degradation in Southeast Asia. They have been portrayed in particular as the principal culprits responsible for deforestation. During the colonial period, the "primitive" "forest vandals," "eaters of the forest," or "robber economy" as shifting cultivators and shifting cultivation were termed in British Burma, French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies respectively, were seen as particularly destructive from the point of view of their threat to high value exportable timber. The negative image of shifting cultivation has been perpetuated in the post-colonial period. This is in spite of the considerable anthropological and ecological evidence that shifting cultivation as practised traditionally can be a sustainable practice and is often based on a sophisticated knowledge of the environment. Over time, the pejorative aspect of state authorities' approach to swiddening has tended to shift from a focus on the practice of shifting cultivation toward a negative view of shifting cultivators, notably the upland ethnic minority groups who have practised this form of resource use for many generations. One reason for the shift of focus away from the system onto those who practice it is that there appear to be broader agendas in the modem nation state's desire to "stabilize" shifting cultivation. High among these agendas ranks the concern to control people and territory, and permanency of settlement and land use is one strategy to achieve such control. The new initiative by the Asian Development Bank to alleviate poverty in upper watersheds by resettling communities is but the latest example of a grand "developmental" scheme to achieve this aim. Another important feature of the modem nation state's approach to shifting cultivation is to portray it as ethnically defined, a practice associated with backward ethnic minorities. Moreover, this image is reinforced by playing to the ethnic majority constituency, with an intimation that destructive up landers are causing problems for lowland wet rice farmers, are responsible for loss of trees and wildlife, and need to be resettled stabilized, civilized or controlled so that they can benefit from national development Page 2 of 7 There are clearly very real problems of resource and environmental conflict engendered by intensified upland and lowland resource practices. The broad portrayal of conflicts between shifting cultivators and lowlanders as primarily an ethnic conflict is, nevertheless, open to question. This article examines this portrayal critically with reference to local case studies in Laos and Vietnam. Seeking culprits One of the reasons for confusion on the issue of who or what is responsible for particular environmental outcomes is the overlap between discursive and material aspects of the same problem. That is to say, many (discursive) aspects of environmentalism lie largely within the social and political arena and have to do with competing ways in which issues such as deforestation are explained and portrayed rather than with how they actually take place or their resulting biophysical Other aspects of environment and environmentalism are more clearly material in nature, but nevertheless remain obfuscated in part because of exclusive attention to immediate and overt cause-effect linkages rather than to those that occur at a greater distance in time, space or along chains of causation. Recognizing the issues of politics of blame and of ultimate versus proximate cause assists in the demystification of ethnicity as an issue in and of itself. Nam Ngum Watershed, Lao PDR Nam Ngum Watershed in the catchment area of the Nam Ngum Dam, which provides most of Lao PDR's electricity and about a quarter of the country's foreign exchange earnings through electricity sales to Thailand. The 8,460 square kilometre watershed is home to about 80,000 people from diverse ethnic groups. The two largest of these are Thai Phuan (Lao Loum) and Hmong (Lao Soung). Resource users in the watershed include the dam itself, timber operators, lowland and upland cultivators. A range of pressures has led to intensified use of land, water and forest resources and to a heightened level of competition — and sometimes conflict — within the watershed. An important question is whether this conflict is primarily between resource users from different ethnic groups, or whether other factors may be more significant. Environmental degradation and the politics of blame As the environment has become a prominent issue globally and in each country of Southeast Asia, so culprits as well as causes of problems such as deforestation, soil erosion, water shortages, loss of biodiversity and pollution have been sought. The critique of mainstream development as a primary cause of environmental problems has been turned around by agencies of mainstream development to see these problems as resulting from backwardness, underdevelopment and poverty. Environment has entered the public arena through what might be termed the "politics of blame" — that is, seeking out and putting the responsibility on a particular socio-economic actor or group of actors. Not surprisingly, such politics of blame is open to the creation of scapegoats. Page 3 of 7 At the national level, less affluent, less educated, less urban farmers, peasants, and upland dwellers in particular have been singled out as the culprits who are destroying the environment at the expense of lowlanders. At a local level, the politics of blame take on a more specifically ethnic dimension. In northern Thailand, in Laos and in Vietnam, ethnic minority uplanders are portrayed as backward and destructive in their agricultural practices, most notably through shifting cultivation. The discourse of the dominant politics of blame in this case employs and exploits ethnic difference. Long San District, Nam Ngum On the northeastern edge of the Nam Ngum Reservoir, the villages of Namon and Huai Nhyaang are adjacent communities of a similar size — about 60 households in each. [Watershed 2 (3) includes interviews with the two village heads of Namon and Huai Nhyaang.] Namon is a lowland Lao village whose land and houses were flooded by the reservoir in the late 1960s, while Huai Nhyaang is a Hmong village that has settled here since the early 1980s. While relations between the communities have historically been good, tensions have increased in recent years as the upper slopes of the hills behind Huai Nhyaang village have been partially cleared of their forest cover and as the streams used to irrigated wet rice fields have started to run dry for longer periods of the year as a consequence. Superficially, this appears to be a classic case of conflict between two ethnically distinct groups of uplanders and lowlanders as found elsewhere in Southeast Asia. In fact, the situation is considerably more complicated. The earlier Hmong settlers in Huai Nhyaang cleared their own wet rice fields, and these farmers also face the problems of reduced stream-flow; there are thus Hmong farmers who have more in common with their lowland Lao neighbours than with their fellow Hmong villagers cultivating the upper slopes. There are also lowland Lao from Namon who engage in swidden cultivation, although most of this is rotational on the lower slopes, and others who have recently cut trees illegally as they have seen outsiders — including, until recently, those selling to a small timber mill that was operating in Namon - exploiting the resource. Meanwhile, most of the current use of upper slopes is now by villagers from the adjacent communities of Don Seua and Don Samphan rather than from Huai Nhyaang. A major pressure on Huai Nhyaang has come as the reservoir level has risen above that of recent years and has flooded the Hmong rice terraces, and this is in turn attributable in part to the water supplementation from Nam Song Dam. Thus, what at first appears to be a primarily ethnically based problem of resource use turns out to have a more complex material basis and to be related to pressures from outside resource users. Page 4 of 7 Muang Sum area, Nam Ngum Several communities on the northwestern edge of Nam Ngum reservoir are also facing exacerbated resource pressures of a somewhat different type. The village of Muang Sum is an old, established lowland Lao com- munity that until recently had a pattern of wet rice farming in the valleys and that maintained areas of forest on surrounding hillsides, However, in recent years, some of the surrounding forest has been rapidly cleared for upland rice cultivation. Most of those clearing the slopes are ethnic minority Khamu or Hmong farmers. Once again, closer attention to the problem reveals other than a straightforward explanation based on ethnic differences in agricultural practices. Muang Sum was chosen as a resettlement area for nearly 80 Hmong families returning from refugee camps in Thailand. While the UNHCR initially provided rice for these families, they were left to their own devices after 18 months and many have had little option but to clear new land to provide for their own subsistence. There is a plan to clear and irrigate an area suited to wet rice, but this would require diversion of the stream on which the original Muang Sum farmers depend. Furthermore, Khamu villagers from surrounding villages have been encroaching on Muang Sum forests as they have been resettled by provincial authorities into this area.

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