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Brau and Su ethnic peoples have occupied Xe Pian NPA for at least 200 years. In the last 50 years lowland Lao Loum groups have also moved into the area to establish permanent villages. Today a total of 65 villages are dependent, to varying degrees, on the protected area for their livelihoods and way of life. There are about 48 villages around the boundary of the protected area and 17 inside comprising a total population in excess of 10,000 people.
Most of the local people practice a subsistence way of life, based on paddy rice farming and fishing in the numerous wetlands of the protected area, with a varying dependency on forest resources for providing supplementary food, building materials, medicine and produce for sale. Those villages insidethe protected area or on its boundary tend to have a greater dependency on forest resources, especially in times of rice shortages. Slash and burn hill farming is not widely practiced by local people in Xe Pian probably because of the unsuitability of the terrain and the prefereBan Mai & Ban Phonesaat Villages – Xe Pian River nce for paddy farming.
Participatory biodiversity assessments with villages inside the protected area have revealed that local people have a detailed ecological knowledge of the forest and wildlife communities that they are dependent upon. For example, semi-evergreen and deciduous forests have been classified by local people into at least 22 sub-habitat types depending on their floral and faunal characteristics, geographical location, and cultural and utilitarian importance. Local beliefs have also given varying degrees of cultural protection t certain landscape features such as mountain ridges or salt licks and also to certain species such as gaur, banteng, and large cats.
In general, the local people of Xe Pian are aware of many of the conservation issues currently affecting the protected area and their own livelihoods, especially the recent decline in the population of some species. Local people are working with protected area staff to develop effective co-management arrangements. |
