Robert E. Moïse, an American anthropologist, began doing research with local communities in the Congo Basin rainforest during the mid-1980s.  At that time, local people had problems like everyone else, but land issues were not among them.  In recent decades, however, due to the activities of extractive industries and agribusiness, as well as the creation of conservation parks on their lands, the livelihoods of many Congo Basin peoples have been seriously undermined, if not destroyed.  Most anywhere one travels in the region today, local people recount similar stories -- of impoverishment, dispossession and violence, which is visited on them by security forces working on behalf of extractive industries and conservation organizations.  

Yet despite the fact that such scenarios are commonplace throughout the region, information about them rarely makes the news -- either in the media of Congo Basin countries or on the TV screens and new outlets of the wider world.  An expression used to describe the firewall of silence separating the daily reality of Congo Basin peoples and the wider world is quite telling: "what happens in the forest, stays in the forest."

The primary reason for such silence is that the forces behind the dispossession and violence have the power to control the circulation of information nationally and internationally so that word about them never gets out.  However, the mission of Rainforest Voices is to bring these silenced stories to the attention of the international public.  

By inspiring public discussion and debate about these issues, it is hoped that those responsible for current misguided policies will be held accountable, making it possible to find solutions to the challenges of contemporary forest management that take into account the livelihoods and well-being of the region's 75 million inhabitants -- the very populations that have managed the land sustainably throughout the millennia.