{"id":29876,"date":"2025-11-04T12:38:58","date_gmt":"2025-11-04T02:38:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/woodcentral.com.au\/?p=29876"},"modified":"2025-11-04T12:39:01","modified_gmt":"2025-11-04T02:39:01","slug":"logging-is-pushing-64-of-uncontacted-peoples-toward-extinction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/woodcentral.com.au\/logging-is-pushing-64-of-uncontacted-peoples-toward-extinction\/","title":{"rendered":"Logging is Pushing 64% of Uncontacted Peoples Toward Extinction"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A 191-page report by Survival International warns that up to 65 per cent of the world’s at least 196 uncontacted Indigenous groups face immediate threats from logging, 40 per cent from mining, and about 20 per cent from agribusiness, with the vast majority concentrated in the Amazon basin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is according to the London-based advocacy group, which says that these communities \u2014 deliberately isolated after generations of violence, slavery and disease \u2014 are under intensifying pressure from both legal and illegal incursions, and that half of the groups \u201ccould be wiped out within 10 years if governments and companies do not act.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThese are what I would call silent genocides \u2014 there are no TV crews, no journalists. But they are happening, and they\u2019re happening now,\u201d said Fiona Watson, Survival International’s research and advocacy director.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Click here to download the report<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

The new tally reveals that the human crisis is a collision between commercial interests and communities that maintain autonomous lifeways through hunting, fishing, and small-scale cultivation. The groups are not \u201clost tribes\u201d frozen in time, Watson said. \u201c(Instead) they\u2019re happy in the forest. They have incredible knowledge and they help keep these very valuable forests standing \u2014 essential to all humanity in the fight against climate change.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Experts and advocates warn that the problem is exacerbated by government indifference and misconceptions. Because uncontacted peoples do not participate in formal politics and their lands are often coveted for timber, minerals, and agricultural expansion, they are frequently treated as politically marginal or seen through reductive stereotypes that either romanticise them or portray them as impediments to development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cA simple cold that you and I recover from in a week \u2026 they could die of that cold,\u201d said Dr Subhra Bhattacharjee, director general of the Forest Stewardship Council and an Indigenous rights expert, who last week was in Panama City for the FSC General Assembly, who said contact can destroy livelihoods, belief systems as well as health, and that international law\u2019s requirement of free, prior and informed consent \u2014 FPIC \u2014 cannot be meaningfully satisfied for groups living in voluntary isolation. \u201cNo FPIC means no consent,\u201d he said, adding that his organisation follows a strict policy: \u201cNo contact, no-go zones.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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