“We trust that this measure of discipline will serve as a stern warning that zeal for research must not be carried to the point where it violates the basic rights and immunities of a human person.”
(quoted in Skloot 2011, p. 135).
Rebecca Skloot is quoting clinical guidelines for physicians newly created in the US in 1965. This was long after the world in general had recognized the value of such ‘discipline’ in the Nuremberg Code, which has governed—in a voluntary sense—all human experimentation worldwide. The Nuremberg Code was the global response to Hitler’s infamous crimes that had earlier prompted (and continued during) WWII.
Reading this phrase, I couldn’t help substituting ‘zeal for profit’ for ‘zeal for research’; and I thought about the possible good sense of substituting ‘human communities’ for ‘human person’. The fact that in the US the medical profession has stopped the heinous practices (specifically, experimenting on black community members and prisoners without their knowledge or consent) that prompted the US guidelines gave me hope that businesses operating in and near developing country communities might be similarly kept in line. US Universities and the US Government have had ethics boards (or Internal Review Boards) for decades now, groups that provide oversight for research done on ‘human subjects’ by faculty members and recipients of government funding, respectively. Although such boards can be bureaucratic nightmares for anthropologists conducting ethnographic research, they have served to sensitize many researchers to possible ethical abuses and have surely also prevented many abuses. However, academics are not the world’s powerful.
In the tropics, we still see companies and governments regularly committing egregious violations of what would now be considered human rights in the US and other ‘developed’ countries. In tropical forests, many companies (with governmental acquiescence or even encouragement)
- routinely usurp local people’s lands held within traditional ownership and management systems;
- conduct logging, develop plantations and other agro-industrial operations with little or no regard for human health and safety;
- discriminate against local people in favor of in-migrants from other regions or even other countries;
- ignore issues of gender equity, providing jobs and benefits disproportionately to men.
There are efforts underway to develop appropriate guidelines, though they remain in their infancy. Efforts to require FPIC—Free, Prior and Informed Consent—are a recent example. Associated requirements have been developed by various parties in recent years. But only a small minority of companies and projects have adopted such voluntary procedures. There remain difficult quandaries about how to implement and monitor FPIC. Like some US and international requirements for gender equity in projects, ‘faking it’ is not difficult: boilerplate paragraphs are easy to add to proposals (or PR statements) and ignore during implementation. With FPIC, even defining its constituent parts is difficult. Those whose consent is required may be illiterate, from very different and socially subordinate cultural systems and/or ethnic groups, unfamiliar and uncomfortable with the bureaucratic practices of companies and other outside agents.
There is also growing alarm about what many have called ‘land grabs’ in developing countries. Although the alarm has only gained traction in recent years, as biofuel development has in some areas superseded food production, in fact land grabbing in developing countries has been underway for decades, no centuries. In Indonesia, a widespread trend since the 1970s has gone like this:
- First logging companies entered traditional territories for which local people had no certificates of land ownership, with governmental encouragement.
- A few years later, an industrial tree plantation would be given by the government to the company that had logged the valuable timber from the lands these people had called their own. As the plantation came in and usurped some 2-300,000 ha, the option of conducting swidden agriculture—the only food crops system that had really worked in the infertile tropical soils of Indonesia’s Outer Island—would disappear. Unlike logging or swiddens, this conversion would be permanent.
- At the same time or shortly thereafter, the government would plan a transmigration project in the area, bringing in thousands of transmigrants from other islands to serve as the work force for the plantation (which in fact only needed a significant number of workers consistently in the very early stages of its operation). The plan for these transmigrants to practice settled agriculture would fail, due to infertile soils and unpredictable weather.
- So the government, in cooperation with industry, would plan rubber, or more recently oil palm plantations, converting the once-independent farmers (who’d practiced a cash poor, but socially, environmentally and nutritionally adequate way of life) into a much poorer rural proletariat, in some cases dependent on the company for their very survival.
Another, perhaps less egregious example, comes from conservation. There, areas that people have seen and managed as their own are given by the government to a conservation group to manage. Although experiences vary, in the most damaging instances local people are simply told they can no longer practice swidden agriculture, hunt, or collect other forest products, all central to their very survival. Inadequate governance in many cases has meant that people were able actually to continue these practices, but were thereby automatically defined as criminals as they lived their lives in their accustomed way. Such policies also reduced people’s confidence in their and their children’s future rights, which in turn reduced their commitments to maintaining and protecting their environment. A vicious cycle of competition for land and products has often ensued in which neither people nor the environment benefits. In Indonesia and many other tropical forest areas, land grabbing is nothing new—but globally it’s on the rise.
There are other attempts to provide useful guidelines to protect people’s rights: CIFOR’s Criteria and indicators for sustainable forest management (CIFOR 1999), for community management (Ritchie et al 2000), and for plantation management (Sankar et al. 2000) all included serious attention to human well being. Some of these kinds of guidelines were incorporated into national guidelines (e.g., in Austria, Cameroon, Canada, Gabon, South Africa, USA), with varying impacts in the forests and forest communities. More recent efforts have included a focus on human rights (e.g., Campese et al. 2009) or on improved oil palm plantation management (Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, RSPO). In many countries inadequate governance has meant that no or few policies are really enforceable. FLEGT, which aims to strengthen enforcement of laws has some worrying implications for local people’s livelihoods (see e.g., Colchester 2006), given the common definition of their subsistence system—swidden agriculture—as illegal!
So…with all these worrying and inadequate efforts, one can lose hope. But reading the history of how the US managed to gain some control over the most heinous medical practices does provide an encouraging example. It gives me hope that—perhaps—we can begin to harness these industries that still remain free to run roughshod over rural peoples with only minimal capacity to defend themselves.
References – some available on CIFOR.org
Campese, Jessica, Terry Sunderland, Thomas Greiber and Gonzalo Oviedo 2009. Rights-Based Approaches: Exploring Issues and Opportunities in Conservation. In Rights-Based Approaches: Exploring Issues and Opportunities in Conservation, 305. Bogor, Indonesia: CIFOR/IUCN.
CIFOR 1999. C&I Toolbox, Bogor, Indonesia, CIFOR.
Colchester, M. 2006. Reflections on the Social Dimensions of Verification in FLEGT Processes: Issues, Risks and Challenges. Available: http://www.odi.org.uk/sites/odi.org.uk/files/odi-assets/publications-opinion-files/4490.pdf.
Ritchie, Bill, Cynthia McDougall, Mandy Haggith and Nicolette Burford de Oliveira 2000. Criteria and indicators of sustainability in community managed forest landscapes: an introductory guide. Bogor, Indonesia: CIFOR.
Skloot, R. 2011. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, New York, Random House.