How does the church respond to natural resource conflict in Southeast Asia?

Laura S. Meitzner Yoder
John Stott Chair and Director of Human Needs and Global Resources
Professor of Environmental Studies
Wheaton College, IL USA

2018 Stott-Bediako Forum

Manila, Philippines
14th-15th September 2018

 

For over 20 years I’ve been working with resource conflict areas in Southeast Asia, learning much from the indigenous forest-dwellers and farmers who face chronic prejudice that limits their secure access to the land and forests that support their livelihoods, cultures, and lifestyles.  As high-quality timber becomes scarce and land grabs are now occurring throughout the region, people who live in remote highlands and members of ethnic minority groups face increasing pressure from others who seek access to their regions’ resources. And people caught in violent conflicts face absolute insecurity of land access as they must flee their forests and fields which have become the terrain for ideological battles, state and corporate resource exploitation, and the political posturing of regional territorialism.

What are or could be the church’s roles in the face of natural resource conflicts across Southeast Asia, including in areas where Christians are a small minority of the population?  This is one area of integral mission where the church has had relatively little voice.  A driving question is this: How does the church respond when congregants and other communities face land/forest eviction or reduced access due to outsiders’ desire to control their region’s natural resources?  Is this something to which the local and global church can or should respond?  In asking this question, I anticipate that there are responses and roles for local churches in areas directly affected by resource conflict, as well as for those that are geographically distant.  In this paper, I will describe three examples of resource conflicts and church responses from Indonesia, Thailand, and Burma/Myanmar, and conclude with some questions for consideration and discussion.

Mapping and forest claims in Indonesia

The first example comes from West Papua, Indonesia, when working alongside a coalition of Christian churches and secular academic initiatives in the late 1990s.  Among the first assignments I received was to teach rainforest-dwelling Papuan villagers who inhabited an interior mountain valley to grow carrots, a high-value product in the lowland hot tropics. To help with this assignment, I visited various government agencies around town to learn what projects and resources they had for the valley where I was to teach carrot-growing. One department planned a plywood factory; another had ambitions for a state-owned cattle ranch; one hoped to relocate the native residents and bring in outside workers for a planned oil palm plantation; and since the area was designated a national park, one official calmly informed me that no people actually lived in the region. At that time, not one government agency had any plans for the valley that acknowledged or included the presence of the local people who had well-defined, clan-level claims to all the land and forest in that region. One agency’s regional sketch had the east-west orientation of the valley’s three villages with grass airstrips reversed, but official staff seemed unconcerned about this error as their planning was detached from the valley population.  When I asked another office why the official map for the area did not show the eleven dispersed villages that were home to the 1500 people with whom I worked, an administrator calmly told me that there were no villages, and that no people lived in the region.  Such official denial of the existence and relevance of local people represented a failure to see their humanity as meaningful or precious.

I learned that the valley residents were to be forcibly relocated from their valley to another region, so that state enterprises could have unfettered access to their rich mountain forest resources and the broad valley floor.  The plan to grow carrots quickly turned toward ways to use a small legal window to obtain durable land rights for the valley residents.  I wondered: How can these communities pursue continued residence and land/forest access in the face of such pressures?

Who were the proper institutional partners to support villagers in this work?  The local university where I worked?  The regional legal aid society?  Some NGO?  Given my own absorbed theological orientation at that time about the normal domain of church involvement in the world, I did not naturally assume that this initiative would be housed in, much less coordinated by, the church.  But when I was explaining this situation to the pastor of the local churches in the valley (who was from a different Indonesian island and ethnolinguistic group), he immediately started making plans for carrying out some mapping and data collection that needed to be done.  This surprised me – but there was no question for him that this work was well within the domain of the church’s mandate.

All local congregations got involved in community mapping of clan boundaries and disputed zones throughout the valley.  This would not have happened without the support of the church.  People were able to establish their presence and to produce sufficient evidence of their customary claims to remain, though the threat of land and resource expropriation remains a critical reality.[1]  Church involvement included the following four aspects:

1. Local pastors took the initiative to announce and to explain the mapping effort, and its importance and legitimacy as supporting the well-being of the local congregants.
2. Pastors designated the church yard as the gathering space to conduct mapping after Sunday services.
3. Church presence and support was important to manage some boundary disputes that arose in the process.
4. In partnership with an international church organization that provided a small amount of funding to support this effort, the valley churches invited regional government officials to attend a special Easter celebration in the valley (accessed by small airplane). They came and witnessed that there are people who live there.  We hosted a “natural resource fair” in which each village demonstrated their knowledge of the valley, which was part of the evidence for legal recognition and collective land rights at that time.

Land restoration and citizenship documentation in Thailand

The second example is from the Upland Holistic Development Project in northern Thailand, which began as a Baptist-supported integrated agriculture program.[2]  From the mid-1990s, UHDP began working with migrant Palaung (upland ethnic minority) farming communities, and their tenuous situation became apparent.  Many adults or youth who had not attended Thai schools possessed no government-issued identity cards, which were necessary for freedom of movement and social resources including education, health care, and formal employment.  Due to their uncertain land tenure status, agricultural and livelihood improvement efforts were stymied as the villagers were subject to periodic removal from the fields and forests they used as well as occasional mass arrests. When a regional government official initiated internationally promoted efforts to register stateless residents, UHDP leadership wondered: Is assistance with citizenship documentation a necessary component of our efforts to secure the resource-based livelihoods of ethnic minority communities?

Soon after, a European church donor increased funding for these efforts, enabling the registration to extend to Kachin, Lahu, and other communities as well.  Slow national policy changes eventually enabled these groups to receive documentation or even Thai citizenship.  Critically important to agrarian communities was how having documentation strengthened their land tenure and imparted a sense of stability and permanence that fostered investment in long-term sustainable farming approaches, such as agroforestry.  In this case, church involvement took the following forms:

1. A Christian organization working in the region became aware of, and then acted on, how erratic natural resource access affected the practical and everyday lives of people in their agrarian community – both inside the church and beyond it.
2. This recognizes the God-given dignity of vulnerable communities who are marginalized in multiple ways. Their approach developed and changed as they gained more knowledge of and closeness to the communities affected by limited land and forest access.
3. An international church coalition (e.g., Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, Diakonia) supported this work over the long term that it took for the efforts to bear fruit.

 

Tree planting in Burma/Myanmar

The third example comes from Burma, where the Myanmar Baptist Convention has over 200 years of history and nearly 2 million members in 18 language groups, with congregations found in every district in the country.  Many churches are in districts affected by protracted conflicts with the national military, in which political sovereignty and access to the immense natural resource wealth of the forested border areas of the country are intertwined.  In the course of discussing agricultural and environmental initiatives that the national church entity promoted, a church leader shared how every June first, each Burmese Baptist should plant one tree.  In addition, they report to their local congregation how each of their trees planted in previous years was faring.  In a context where dry season burning of villages and forests was part of annual anti-insurgency efforts to keep villagers on the move, the choice to plant a tree is a significant statement of presence, of visibility, and of not being defeated.  Across most of Southeast Asia and Melanesia, planting a tree is also an act of claiming land and durable rights to harvest the products from that tree, so planting is a powerful symbol of permanence and belonging, as well as investing in a place for the long term.

Church involvement in this case includes the following:

1. Tree planting is a significant response from a church facing systematic barriers to their continued and permanent presence in forested regions that are conflict zones. Even as forests are burned, church members will plant more trees.
2. Widespread tree planting is a simple, positive testimony to those who would abuse communities and the forests that are their home.
3. The Burmese church bears witness to hope despite ongoing loss. Even amidst immense suffering, tree planting demonstrates the refusal of the church to give up on the hope for restoration of all creation.

These are three examples of churches who became aware of and engaged with the realities of their congregants and wider communities whose lives, livelihoods, presence, and wholeness were bound up in conflicts over access to natural resources.

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[1]This region still faces critical struggles for recognition and access; http://www.forestpeoples.org/en/node/50325.  For more on the mapping process: https://c.ymcdn.com/sites/members.echocommunity.org/resource/collection/E66CDFDB-0A0D-4DDE-8AB1-74D9D8C3EDD4/Participatory_Mapping.pdf

[2]Acknowledgement and thanks to UHDP co-founder Rick Burnette for providing this detail.  See http://uhdp.orgfor more information.

 

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Some questions for thought…

1. INFEMIT is a fellowship of theologian practitioners. How is local or global church inattention to natural resource conflicts a theological problem of the church?
2. How does the reality of natural resource conflict — often an outcome of greed — that reflects injustice and causes suffering among the vulnerable affect theological practice of the Christian church?