Fair trade – a taste of justice

I love to the villages of the Aeta indigenous people of Zambales where I have worked for the past 45 years. These original Filipino people have survived for millennia on the northern island of the tropical archipelago, as long as 30,000 years, some anthropologists say. I climbed the grassy hills which were once their ancestral homelands and were deep in the primeval rain forest but since the turn of the century, the rain forests have been under logging attack and are almost gone. Their demise has made global warming all the worse.

The Aeta people would have been gone too since they are the people most badly affected by this loss of habitat. Most of the wildlife have disappeared or has been greatly diminished. So the Aeta people lost their traditional means of survival. But they learned to plant and nurture the logged-over land. They are a gentle, peace loving people and until the forests were cut down they were forest dwellers, hunters and gatherers. Now, they live in small tribal groups in small villages.