In 1970 an estimated 200 million people lived in tropical rainforests. Recently Norman Myers, an environmental scientist at Oxford University in England indicated that the figure today may be as high as 500 million Of these, only 50 million are tribal people made up of over 2,000 individual groups.
The majority of rainforest inhabitants are subsistence farmers (see under 'Migrant Settlers' in the Debates section). For centuries indigenous tribes have lived a simple life in the forests as either hunter-gatherers or shifting cultivators. Some tribes, however, such as the Siriono tribe of Bolivia and the Yanomami tribe of Amazonia, while primarily hunter-gatherers practise shifting cultivation at the same time.
Hunter-gatherers
Hunter-gatherers are through to be the oldest existing culture in the world. The Semang and Penan tribes of Malaysia, survive by hunting game, fishing, and gathering plant foods like fruit, berries and nuts from the forest. Many of the forest animals, including tapir, deer, wild pigs and monkeys provide essential extra protein necessary for a well-balanced diet. Hunter-gatherers, which include the Mbuti, and Efe pygmies of Africa, often lead a nomadic existance and live in small family groups.
African pygmy tribes are the largest remaining group of hunter-gatherers on earth. Unlike some tribespeople, hunter-gatherers are generally easy-going, believing in the principle of equal rights. They are also often non-hierarchical, although some do have chiefs, particularly Amazonian tribes.
Shifting cultivators
Shifting cultivators practise a type of farming which makes the best possible use of the rainforests poor soil. It is founded on field, rather than crop, rotation. Small areas of forest are cleared. The vegetation is left to dry out which usually takes about one month, after which it is burned. The resulting ash contains valuable plant nutrients and serves as fertiliser. Crops are immediately planted to decrease the chances of the rains washing away the nutrient rich ash. A large variety of crops are grown to reduce the risk of loss from possible disease or pest attacks.
Different crops require different nutrients and this also helps to make better use of an already impoverished soil. After 2-3 years the soil becomes exhausted and a new area is cleared. The previously cleared area is left for several years allowing it time to recuperate after which time it may be used again. Tribes such as the Amazonian Waura, the Senoi of Malaysia and the Bantu, who dominate the African rainforests, practise shifting cultivation which is also known as 'slash and burn' agriculture.
Rubber tappers
Rubber plantations in Malaysia and Indonesia were established from seeds taken from Brazil in the 19th century. However, there are still half a million rubber tappers working in the forests of Brazil today. Rubber tappers or seringueiros, as they are known in Brazil, consider themselves to be rainforest people having lived in the forest for 150 years. The raw material for natural rubber is a milky white sap called latex which is collected by making several stanted cuts into the bark of the tree where it oozes from the cuts and runs into a cup.
Rubber is used to make a variety of items including pencil erasers and car tires. Rubber tappers also earn money by harvesting brazil nuts which has other uses beside as a food. The oil from the brazil nut is used in hair conditioner, for example.
Conflict over the years between cattle ranchers and rubber tappers has led to the deaths of several rubber tappers, including Chico Mendes, the founder of the seringueiros union.
Countries with tropical rainforests are often poor and their Governments owe enormous debts to foreign banks. Some of these governments offer their poor, who live in crowded slums in the cities, incentives to move into the rainforests. With a promise of free land, seeds to grow crops, tools to build housing, and the building of highways to make access easier, thousands of settlers have moved into the forests looking for a better way of life. Because the forest soil is so poor and settlers do not have the knowledge to manage it properly, they quickly move on destroying more and more rainforest as they go.
In Rondonia, Brazil, the original settlers cleared nearly 35,000 square miles of rainforest within a period of 4 years before they moved on or went back to the cities they had come from.
As the numbers of settlers accelerated, their uses for the rainforests increased. Primary rainforests are burned to provide grazing land for cattle, huge tracts of forests are cleared to make highways making it easier for mining and logging activities to flourish. Vast areas are flooded as hydroelectric dams are built. Today the number of settlers in the rainforests far outnumber the number of indigenous people.
Shaman
The shaman, or medicine person, is an extremely imporant member within a tribe. In his head is stored a wealth of knowledge of the medicinal properties of rainforest plants. For many hundreds of years this knowledge has been passed down verbally from the shaman of one generation to the shaman of the next generation. Today, sadly there are fewer of the younger tribespeople who are willing to continue this tradition, and this knowledge is in greater danger of elimination than the plants themselves. One in four prescription medicines used by doctors today contains substances originally discovered in rainforest plants.
These discoveries have been found in fewer than the 1 per cent of tropical plants which have been studied. In Belize, a small country in Central America, a group of healers have set up, with the help of the Belize government, a 6,000 acre area of lowland rainforest for the protection of medicinal plants. Known as the Terra Nova Forest Reserve this is the world's first ethnobiomedical forest reserve. The land is owned by the government but will be managed by the healers themselves. Plant medicines are used by three quarters of the people of Belize.
