ent projects in the region do not only involve massive efforts in replacing traditional crops and livestock production but also productive techniques which development planners and experts consider superior, frequently without analysing carefully their environmental implications.
Unfortunately, the many misguided efforts and attempts by 'local elites' to apply inappropriate development policies, strategies and technologies to fragile environments where tribal people live are, sometimes, reinforced by bilateral financial aid institutions and international assistance. The World Bank has come under heavy criticism in recent years for ignoring non-economic considerations, and contravening many United Nations declarations for the protection of tribal communities, in its approvals of development funds. Such criticisms, fortunately, have caused the World Bank to reduce its support for transmigration projects in Indonesia (Colchester, 1987), led to its disassociation from plans to construct dams along the Chico River valley in the Philippines (Bello, 1981), and more recently withdrawal of its support for the timber-related industries in the region (New Straits Times, 3 October 1991).
By and large, the marginalization of indigenous tribal people has increasingly been viewed as the result of their domination and exploitation by advanced, outside socioeconomic groups, and the destruction of the physical environment by external activities. The increased incidence of food shortage experienced by many nomadic groups in SouthEast Asia, such as the Penan tribe of Sarawak, is frequently seen as the direct result of environmental damage caused through economic encroachment by economically advanced outside groups (Eder, 1987). In the case of the Penan, blame is placed on the timber industry (Hong, 1987). Similar rhetoric citing poverty as the result of inadequate attention given by planners, and that industrialists see urban squatters as a cheap source of labour-has been used to explain impoverishment among these and other low-income groups. While admitting the significant roles of such external factors, one must, however, admit that internal factors play an equally important role.
Poverty and tradition have also led to environmental damage in different ways. As Lian (1987) observed, the obsession with trying to escape from the clutch of repressive, traditional socio-political and economic systems has been important, and so too is the desire to emulate the economic achievements and to keep abreast with the level of socio-economic progress attained by their economically advanced neighbours. Even a desire to leap out of the agricultural sector has been among the factors which drove subsistence Kenyah farmers of the East Malaysian state of Sarawak to engage actively in nonagricultural activities. While such decisions and changes led to the weakening of the ecologically viable traditional system of swidden agriculture because a shortage of labour forced Kenyah farmers to use land closer to the village more intensively, resulting in lower farm production in the long term, the Kenyah saw such a move as economically more advantageous. It is also one of the effective means of keeping most of the population in their traditional homeland, and indirectly protecting it from outside incursion. The Kenyah tribe considers greater interaction with the outside world as a viable and relatively rational strategy of resource management; moreover, it is one which they see as reducing their exploitation by outside communities. A similar trend is observed among the Orang Asli tribes of Peninsular Malaysia (Gomes, 1990; Hood Salleh, 1989). As Gomes (1990: 12) argues, 'Against popular conception, capitalism did not completely destroy Orang Asli economies but actually transformed them in such a manner as to allow the continuance of subsistence-oriented economic activities and the preservation of the salient features of their traditional economy: diversity, flexibility and adaptability.'
Adaptability is probably one of the important issues that needs to be addressed