Biofuel threat to indigenous people

Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, chairwoman of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, said the explosion of biofuel crop cultivation threatened to destroy native cultures by forcing them into big cities.

Indonesia and Malaysia are among those most at risk because together they produce 80 per cent of the world's palm oil - one of the crops used to make biofuels.

Tauli-Corpuz said that in one Indonesian province, West Kalimantan, the UN had identified five million indigenous people who were likely to be displaced because of the expansion in the production of biofuel crops.

Indigenous people who depend on forests almost entirely for their survival are being forced to migrate to already overcrowded cities, where many of them end up living in slums with limited access to services and poor housing, Ida Nicolaisen, an expert in indigenous cultures and member of the UN forum, said.

She told a news conference on Monday that many countries did not realise how fast the displacement was occurring.

'High stakes'

"The speed with which this is happening - we don't really realise in our part of the world. Because the technology we have today and the economic resources that are at stake are so big, it happens overnight."

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