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Showing posts from June, 2012

Nepal: Local resources being exploited by corporate interests

In Nepal, the government has supported a community forestry model that has been very successful in giving rights to local communities to manage their own forests. This, however, doesn’t protect the community from private companies, especially giant Indian companies which sell herbal medicines, from entering their forests and simply picking and leaving with kilograms of precious herbs and medicinal botanical materials which they are not compensated for. “People come and pick jari-buti (medicinal herbs) in the forests and leave with basketloads-we have no idea what they are taking,” one woman told me. The other trend has been for private companies to enter communities and offer a token amount of money, for which the community then sells its entire forest for timber, or for furniture industries. A case like this was reported from the Terai, in Southern Nepal, which is close to the Indian border and whose forests have decreased severely in the past  decade due to rapacious