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Seizing the opportunity
Mountains are well-suited to subsistence farming. When it comes to producing high-yielding cash crops, they can't compete with fertile lowlands. However, examples abound of mountain communities that have identified highly specific 'niche' opportunities that generate income and reduce poverty and hunger.
The Prince of Gruyères
Prior to 1950, a lack of jobs meant France's Beaufort Valley was becoming seriously depopulated as young people left in search of opportunities in lowland cities and towns. To offset this trend, local people identified a number of niche opportunities including the creation of a boutique cheese and milk business. Using royalties accruing from a nearby dam, they established the 'Prince of Gruyères' cheese brand. Weaving together traditional dairy know-how, new technology and clever marketing strategies based on the slogan "tradition in modernity", production quintupled and consumers now pay a 25 percent premium for Beaufort milk.
Village taxonomists in Cameroon
Mountains are mazes of microclimates with hidden plant treasures of great value to humanity. Many local communities have shared traditional knowledge about rare plants with outsiders, only to learn to their shock that those outsiders have patented the life forms for personal gain. Such plants can earn considerable profits if they are useful to the pharmaceutical, perfume and other industries.
In Cameroon, local villagers are being trained as 'parataxonomists' to collect and characterize plant genetic resources. The plant samples remain the property of a local non-governmental organization called the Bioresources Development and Conservation Program which is working with the Overseas Development Administration (United Kingdom) and the Limbe Botanical Garden. The plants are analyzed at Cameroonian universities, then sent to universities in the United States of America for further scrutiny. If research partners discover valuable uses for the plants, the Cameroonians will license the plants' use for development. Profits are shared between the partners, including the communities of parataxonomists.
Dams for development
Colossal hydroelectricity dams have been a byword of national development policies for decades. Unfortunately, they can cause environmental and social destruction. An estimated 4 million people move to make way for dams each year. Many of these forced to leave their homelands are mountain people who have long protested what they feel are low levels of compensation for dams that have cost them traditional ways of life and livelihoods.
In 1957, the Warm Springs Indian Reservation Trust in Oregon, United States of America, successfully negotiated US $4 million in compensation for the effects of a Columbia River dam constructed on land that had sustained them for an estimated 11 000 years. The native Americans have used those funds to build a stable forest products industry, a hydroelectricity plant of their own and more jobs than there are local people to fill them. The reservation is filled with young people and a cultural centre celebrates the past and present lives of their people.
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