ABSTRACT
This chapter considers a variety of circumstances across the global South where external development agendas result in the impoverishment of affected communities. Through a mixture of intimidation, coercion, and deception, developers often, under the guise of lifting communities out of poverty, instead plunge them into destitution. The resulting immiseration easily eludes official metrics, as the affected community loses any semblance of subsistence security. Official data also often miss the contributions of agroforestry to a community’s nutritional and spiritual wellbeing. As forest commonage is privatized and converted into plantations and ranches, communities frequently suffer from development-induced poverty. For many Indigenous communities, the measure of community health and wealth is inseparable from the long durée of ancestral time and the generations that are yet to be. In this regard, the extractivist timeframe prevalent among developers is frequently incompatible with a community’s internal understandings of relative poverty and relative wealth.
