In last week’s Procurement with Purpose newsletter, we mentioned a report in the Mail on Sunday.
“Prince Harry is being urged to quit a conservation charity he helps to run after a probe by The Mail on Sunday uncovered allegations that it operates an armed militia engaged in human rights atrocities in Africa”.
Looking into this in more detail, it relates to the African Parks charity, which manages 22 national parks and protected areas across 12 countries. It is investigating allegations of rape, torture and brutality by guards employed by the charity, aimed at the indigenous people who live in these areas within the Republic of the Congo. A statement from the African Parks board said it was investigating the allegations and had a zero-tolerance approach to abuse. It was committed to upholding the rights of local and Indigenous people.
Another charity, Survival International, blew the whistle on this. The Guardian reported Fiore Longo, head of Survival International’s conservation campaign, as saying this.
“With the arrival of protected areas during colonial times many of the locals have already been evicted. But it’s specifically around 2010, when African Parks took over, that the locals said the violence started being worse than before, because their park rangers would beat them every time they tried to get in the forest – which is their home – to collect medicinal plants, hunt and feed their families.”
Land ownership is often a contentious issue in these situations. Al over the world, indigenous people had what was arguably their land “stolen” by colonisers or sometimes by the powerful in their own country. Conservation charities will say that they have to take action against those who are poachers or are maybe destroying natural habitats – through clearance for farming, or logging for instance. But indigenous people have often lived in these areas for hundreds or thousands of years, so probably understand how to conserve the habitat better than external “experts”. And clearly there is no excuse for violence and abuse against anyone who is simply trying to get on with their own lives.
This isn’t just a problem today or in Africa. An article last year on the earth.org website looked at the history of how indigenous people have been affected by conservation moves. It goes right back to the 19th century when Yosemite National Park was created by an act of the US Congress in 1890.
But “when Yosemite was designated, the Ahwahnechee band of Miwok people had been living there for thousands of years. Yosemite’s designation served a twofold purpose. One the one hand, the US could use the park as a nation-building project, intertwining the ideas of a ‘wild’ and ‘untamed’ west with national identity. On the other hand, the government used its ability to designate protected areas as a mechanism to expel indigenous people from their lands”.
Author and award-winning journalist Mark Dowie estimates in his book Conservation Refugees that there might be as many as 14 million people alive today who have been displaced from their homes by the creation of conserved areas and the like. These are in the main indigenous people, many of whom have lived in their ancestral homelands for thousands of years, existing in harmony with the natural world.
Now, through this new form of colonialism, they are being thrown off and driven into urban areas or given peripheral land that is not suitable for their way of life and local economic systems. As well as conservation, the aims of creating these areas often include promoting tourism or big-game hunting. Clearly, this can bring economic benefits for the country and some land owners – but such benefits are rarely shared by the indigenous folk.
This all highlights a dilemma for organisations looking to support this sort of environmental initiative. Going back to the original example, do you financially support African Parks – or Survival International? How do you carry out the appropriate due diligence to make sure your name does not get attached to stories of rape and brutality? Prince Harry has been tarnished by these allegations – you can see how companies could suffer the same fate. It’s just another example of how tricky much of this “purposeful business” agenda can be!