Summit and RI's environmental strategies

European environmental groups know they are exposed because there is no place the poor in their strategies. In response, they have started to contend that their forest conservation policies support the poor because more than 1 billion people are "forest dependent". This is another number that cannot be supported. The forest research agency, CIFOR, argues it might be 200 million at best. Greenpeace has now taken to advocating for the forest-dependency of the largely pre-industrial and nomadic the orang asli in Southeast Asia. True, the region's indigenous people do depend upon the forests. But the result of this dependency is a near subsistence lifestyle of which normal features are high rates of infant mortality, illiteracy, low life expectancy and low standards of living.