FOREST DWELLERS AND FORESTS

Until the latter part of the nineteenth century, most people living in the world's moist tropical forests were almost completely dependent on forestland and resources for food, shelter, medicine and trade products. Small groups typically claimed use rights over a specific area of forest and controlled access to agricultural plots and forest resources through customary law reinforced, in many cases, by religious restrictions. Most forest dwellers were isolated physically from the outside world by distance and natural barriers. They lived at or beyond the periphery of modern society and the market economy. The outside world had little interest in these people or forest resources, with the exception of a few high-value non-timber forest products (NTFPs) and timber species, some of which were traded for centuries.

The isolation that shaped interactions between forest dwellers and tropical forests began to be undermined when national governments and colonial powers extended their power into forested hinterlands; frequently accompanied by laws that shifted legal control of forestland and resources to the state (Poffenberger, 1999; Brookfield et al., 1995). The super-imposition of formal tenure systems over traditional tenure had little initial impact on the lives of most forest dwellers because governments lacked the resources needed to enforce these laws and, in any case, there were few forest resources valuable enough to justify commercial exploitation.