Background briefings
Perupetro - Peruvian national oil firm
Perupetro contracts oil and gas companies to work in Peru. To date, 72% of the Peruvian Amazon has been opened up to companies. Some of these regions are home to vulnerable uncontacted tribes. A loophole in Peruvian law explicitly allows compani...
Petrobras - Brazilian national oil firm
Brazilian state oil company Petrobras has a contract to explore for oil in the south-east of Peru in an area inhabited by the uncontacted Murunahua (or Chitonahua) tribe. This is despite the fact that Brazilian government policy is not to make c...
Petrolifera - Canadian oil firm in Peru
Petrolifera is a Canadian company exploring for oil on land inhabited by uncontacted Cacataibo Indians in Peru. Despite being condemned by a local Indigenous organisation, Petrolifera is determined to work in the region. Some seismic tests have ...
Logging
Logging is a highly profitable and destructive business. Many companies and groups supplying the industry are prepared to do whatever it takes to get their hands on wood. This is often at the expense of tribal peoples. Loggers destroy the forest...
Niyamgiri Hills, India
The Niyamgiri Hills form a mountain range in the Eastern Indian state of Orissa. They are home to more than 8,000 of the Dongria Kondh people, whose lifestyle and religion have helped nurture the area’s dense forests and unusually rich wildlife....
Vedanta Resources
Vedanta Resources, a British company, lost a battle to dig an open-pit bauxite mine on Niyamgiri mountain in India. The mine would have destroyed the forests on which the tribal Dongria Kondh people depend and wreck the lives of thousands of othe...
Anil Agarwal - Chairman of Vedanta Resources
Anil Agarwal, Chairman and founder of Vedanta Resources, has worked his way up from scrap-metal dealer to billionaire with a home in London’s Mayfair and another in Mumbai. The tricks to his trade have been to buy cheap second-hand industrial pl...
CO3
CO3 is a London-based ‘corporate social responsibility’ (CSR) consultancy which represents multinational corporations including mining company Vedanta Resources. Survival has called on CO3 to resign its account with Vedanta over the mining company...
Swine flu
Hundreds of thousands of people around the world are known to have contracted swine flu; more than a thousand have died from the virus. The WHO has declared a global flu pandemic. Tribal peoples are particularly vulnerable to swine flu. Those th...
Factory Schools
“In school, the teachers call us dirty. They call us pigs and dogs.” Rahman, Orang Asli, Malaysia Today around two million tribal children worldwide are being taught in Factory Schools, where they are stripped of their Indigenous identity and indo...
Deforestation
Fighting deforestation is itself big business From roundtables, to suspect sustainability certificates, to huge international conferences, billions of dollars have been spent trying to save our Earth’s arboreal lungs. But what if the easiest, ch...
A Dangerous Controversy
Uncontacted tribes thrive when their lands are protected. They frequently indicate – by pointing arrows up at passing planes, leaving crossed spears in the forest, and more – that they do not want contact. But some academics are calling for outsi...