Rethinking sustainable development. Indigenous peoples and resource use relations in the Philippines

Abstract

Forest-based communities have evolved strategies that usually combine the efficient, although not necessarily simple, appropriation of different aspects of their natural environment. Because forests are a highly diversified environment, they provide opportunities for a variety of productive activities such as forest resource extraction, horticulture, hunting and fishing. The struggle that they are now facing is a tension between accumulation and subsistence production - a contradiction resulting from the integration of subsistence communities with the market economy (Duhaylungsod 1996). [...]the tension is between growth (requiring resources for accumulation) and basic needs (requiring the allocation of resources to consumption/subsistence and an equitable distribution of consumption) (Crow et al. 1988). Land pressure in many 616 Levita Duhaylungsod upland areas has resulted in a history of innovations and alterations in resource management and productive activities' (Russel and Cunningham 1989:8). Because indigenous peoples today are enmeshed in state-building and increasingly pressured to adapt to a commoditized form of production, it is necessary for them to acquire the following capabilities in order to effectively confront the forces impinging on them: Since it is a provincial government project, there is a likelihood that the area, a substantial patch of 108 ha, will eventually be appropriated by the government.