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Abstract:
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"The issues concerning displacement and relocation from protected areas that Rangarajan and Shahabuddin (this issue) describe for India are no confined to South Asia: far from it. These trends are also happening in Southeast Asia, across a range of countries of different political stripes. Policies to impose new parks or strengthen enforcement at existing ones, nationalization of forest reserves, and implementation of stricter conservation rules on private lands under the guise of biodiversity or watershed management have been resulting in significant relocations and dislocations of people (see Lohmann 1999; Vandergeest 2003a and 2003b; Olivier and Goudineau 2004). In Thailand, for example, more than half a million hill dwellers have been blamed for deforestation and damage to watersheds and threatened with relocation. Smaller scale resettlement projects, such as those around local protected areas, often affect from hundreds to thousands of people every year in countries like Indonesia, Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam."
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