Background briefings
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 other...
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...
Barefoot India, Andaman Islands
Barefoot is a travel company with resorts in the Andaman Islands. Its guests have apparently included Oscar-winning actress Kate Winslet. Barefoot opened a new resort close to the islands' Jarawa reserve, set up to protect the recently contacted J...
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...
Samling - Logging firm, Malaysia
Samling is a Malaysian logging company which is destroying forests belonging to the Penan tribe in Sarawak, in the Malaysian part of Borneo. Samling has been operating on Penan land for many years, without the tribe’s consent. The Penan have repea...
Climate Change
Survival International is in the forefront of the fight against false and distracting solutions to climate change. Indigenous peoples and their rights must be at the heart of the environmental and climate movement.
Shin Yang - Logging and oil palm, Malaysia
Shin Yang is a Malaysian logging and oil palm plantation company. Its operations are destroying the Penan tribe’s forests in Sarawak, in the Malaysian part of Borneo.
Wilderness Safaris
Wilderness Safaris is a tourism company with lodges scattered throughout southern Africa. After the Botswana government closed the Bushmen's only water borehole and forced them from their land, Wilderness Safaris opened a tourist lodge on their la...
Shell - oil & gas company
Shell explored for oil in a remote part of the south-east Peruvian Amazon in the early 1980s. The centre of operations was along the River Urubamba, which runs past the famous Inca ruin of Machu Picchu and is a major tributary of the mighty River ...
Madeira River dams
A series of mega dams is being built as a central part of Brazil’s Accelerated Growth Programme, which aims to stimulate the country’s economic growth by building a huge infrastructure of roads and dams, mainly in the Amazon region. The size of th...