Text Box: Destruction and Degradation of the Burmese Frontier Forests Text Box: # Text Box: The chief beneficiaries are Burmese officials and Chinese companies. Meanwhile the Burmese and especially ethnic populations are deprived of many of their chief assets for sustaining livelihoods and for future development. Many ethnic organisations also seem caught in the need for short-term income generation and play along in the squandering of the forests. The end result? More and more environmental destruction and a continuation of the trends outlined in the 1998 WRI report. The devastation however, is not only environmental. Deforestation has its consequences for forests and for forest dwellers, including indigenous people and other forest users. It is on these forest dwellers that, in conjunction with the end of the political repression, the coming of democracy, and the empowerment of local communities, the development of future sustainable environmental policies should be based. But the lack of information on the forest dwellers and on the impacts of deforestation on their social and economic life is, if anything, even greater than the lack of information about the deforestation itself. To address this information gap, representatives of two ethnic groups, from Kachin and Karen State, undertook the first research project, supported by grants from the Tropical Rainforest Programme of the Dutch Committee for the IUCN (NC-IUCN). The results of this research by the Pan Kachin Development Society (PKDS), and the Karen Environmental and Social Action Network (KESAN) in their home states, are presented in this report. The reports of PKDS and KESAN are the first attempts to uncover the social impacts of deforestation and to relate them to environmental degradation. The research was undertaken in a very difficult and dangerous political climate. As a result, the researchers were forced to keep a low profile. The outcome of the research is therefore often uneven and remains impressionistic. These impressions are however sufficient to make us realize that what happens at this moment in the frontier forests of Burma has its implications not only on the terrain of nature conservation, but also on the terrain of the social and economic development of local communities. With the logging and the deforestation a whole new economic and social reality develops, in which most people, having lost their traditional livelihood, are turned into casual labourers and a cheap labour force for local potentates and entrepreneurs. The loss of community forests is another outcome of the global dispossession that opens up even marginal territories to the dictates of the market economy. With this dispossession not only the environment, but also traditional cultures and social organizations disappear. What this report, especially the contribution of KESAN, makes clear, is the positive role that the traditional cultures and traditional environmental policies can play in the formulation and implementation of sustainable forestry policies in Burma. Support for grass-root initiatives and for awareness-raising within local communities should be combined with the political campaigns for democracy in Burma, and with environmental campaigns to stop trade in unsustainable timber, to create an alternative for the present state of degradation and corruption. The future will show whether there is still time left, before one of the last hotspots of biodiversity in Southeast Asia is sacrificed to human greed and narrow-mindedness. References: J. Brunner. 1998. Logging Burma's Frontier Forests: Resources and the Regime. World Resources Institute, Washington. Global Witness. 2003. A Conflict of Interests: The Uncertain Future of Burma's Forests. Global Witness, London. Text Box: NDA-K controlled town on China border