A report from the Overseas Development Institute charges the development industry with ignoring threats to traditional cultures. It decries the paradox that in an age of mass communications, so few resources are mobilised to understand or conserve the cultures of minority peoples living in inaccessible regions.

Why is the international community concerned about preservation of biodiversity yet indifferent to the erosion of cultural diversity? Why do we consider habitats as worthy of conservation yet make so little effort to accumulate indigenous knowledge concerning them? Can the eroding power of globalisation on minority cultures be checked?

A report from the Overseas Development Institute charges the development industry with ignoring threats to traditional cultures. It decries the paradox that in an age of mass communications, with television screens constantly displaying alluring imagery of the flora and fauna of ‘wild' nature, so few resources are mobilised to understand or conserve the cultures of minority peoples living in inaccessible regions.

Development planners seem uncomfortable with ethnic diversity because it challenges the homogenising tendency of economists to reduce populations to quantifiable groups. Professions of interest in indigenous knowledge have not yet led to increased understanding. The task or recording and synthesising the vast body of local knowledge of the natural world has hardly begun and receives minimal funding. Can donor disinterest be explained by the fact that many northern states (particularly Japan, Australia and the USA) have themselves a poor record of managing their own diversity?

States take it upon themselves to make natural resources management decisions without consultation with minority populations. Often the world only learns of the existence of particular ethnic groups when they protest against dams, mines and logging projects.

Not all is doom and gloom, however. The United Nations was about to set up a permanent forum on indigenous rights. Change can be detected in some nation states which formerly oppressed indigenous peoples and proscribed their language, culture and dress. Thus, Morocco has begun to recognise Berber culture, Laos and Vietnam to acknowledge their high ethnic diversity and Colombia to extend self-determination to its Amerindian peoples. Canada's moves to cede territory and control of access to natural resources to indigenous communities could be replicable globally.

Other developments highlighted in the report include:

• NGOs are increasingly able to mobilise international opinion in support of indigenous rights, in part due to more reflective World Bank thinking on the impact of infrastructure projects and the need to defend indigenous land rights.
• ‘Culture' tourism is rapidly expanding into areas of high ethnic diversity, exposing isolated peoples to market forces which inevitably change cultural values.

International agencies are urged to:

• Support national governments to develop and subsidise educational materials and radio programmes in minority languages.
• Stop treating the environmental knowledge of minority cultures as a subject of mere academic interest and start funding knowledge accumulation before it is too late.
• Work towards the establishment of a global framework (akin to the Convention of Biodiversity) to oblige states to recognise the cultural rights of minority communities.
• Monitor the activities of multinationals and agencies engaged in exploitative tourism.
• Recognise that conservation of ethnic and biological diversity go hand in hand. Where many distinct human groups live side-by-side, fauna and flora are more likely to be conserved.

Contributed by Roger Blench. Reprinted with permission from www.id21.org.

To read another Global Envision article about globalization's impact on ethnic identity, see Cuernavaca — Visiting the Frontlines of Globalization.