Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Committee (SOCHUM)

Saharan Africa. On her website, for example, Janet
Museveni, the First Lady of Uganda and the national
minister for the Karamoja region, calls upon pastoral
Advanced farming equipment has allowed the agricultural
industry of certain developed nations to flourish at the expensive
of indigenous ways of life.
farmers to settle their livestock on one location and
begin practicing sedentary agriculture. 126
One of the regional industries in which the
liberalization of trade has had the most effect
is mining in Africa. Many African countries have
liberalized their mining laws over the past thirty years
to encourage foreign investment, in the hopes that
this will help boost their economic growth and overall
gross domestic product (GDP), a primary measure of
economic development. In response, many British,
American, Canadian, and Australian companies
have established operations on these previously
untouched lands with little regard for the indigenous
populations that live and farm there. The presence
of these transnational companies is so extensive
that over 2,600 bilateral agreements had been
signed between African governments and foreign
mining companies by 2008. 127 As may be expected,
these transnational mining companies generally do
not take environmental factors into consideration
when building their infrastructure and implementing
their extractive techniques, which further harms
the situation in which indigenous populations
find themselves. In Africa, the most common
environmental impact is the dissemination of toxic
chemicals in the water supply, which has ruined crops
and farming land and has caused dangerous illnesses
and problems with pregnancies and childbirth. 128
Because they are no longer able to practice their
traditional farming techniques, which are usually
relatively sustainable, indigenous peoples are often
forced to employ other, less environmentally-friendly
methods; this worsens the situation and leaves them
with no means of subsistence or employment. This
pattern is not only evident in the African mining
industry but is also observed in Indonesia’s nickel
industry and the Amazonian natural gas industry. 129
Disregard for Indigenous Land Rights
Another cause of the impoverishment of indigenous
populations is the disregard for local land rights, an
issue that is closely connected to the liberalization of
trade regulations. As alluded to above, in the process
of creating the infrastructure for massive agricultural
or resource extraction industries in a developing
country, many governments and transnational
corporations either explicitly or implicitly expel the
indigenous residents from their land. in many Asian
and African nations, indigenous peoples have no title
to the land on which they reside, and the government
has the complete authority to distribute that land
to members of the country’s ethnic majority or to
domestic or foreign companies. 130 When their land
is taken away, most indigenous peoples lose their
traditional methods of subsistence and are either
forced to live in extreme poverty or migrate to a
city for employment, another problem that will be
discussed.
The problems with the legal frameworks for
indigenous land rights are numerous. Many
countries simply do not have such laws in the first
place, so indigenous populations have no authority
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