Toro United Nations award contender

The Jakarta Post, Margaret Agusta, Contributor

The Toro community of Central Sulawesi is among 26 finalists for the United Nations Equatorial Prize for environmental protection to be presented at the ongoing Conference on Parties 7th Convention on Biodiversity, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

The six winners will be announced at the international meeting of representatives of states, traditional equatorial communities, non-governmental organizations and business people, which is on now until February 21.

The Equatorial Prize is awarded every two years to traditional communities living along the equator that successfully protect their local environments while improving the welfare of their people.

According to Soeryo Wibowo, a senior researcher at the Bogor Institute of Agriculture, the Toro villagers of Kublai district in Donggala regency near the Lore Lindu National Park had been nominated by the Central Sulawesi office of CARE International in August 2000 for the US$30,000 Equatorial Prize.

"In mid January, the United Nations development program formally announced that Toro village was one of 26 finalists for the Equatorial Prize, and that two Toro villagers were invited to attend the conference in Malaysia," said Wibowo on Tuesday.

Wibowo has been researching the Toro community's collective efforts at overcoming their current environmental and economic problems by reviving their customary law and cultivation practices since March 2002.

"At the conference, the Toro village representatives will have the opportunity to meet people from other equatorial communities, to make a presentation on their efforts, and exchange experiences on biodiversity protection," Wibowo further said.

The Toro community's biodiversity-protection initiative began in 1993 with efforts to re-establish their cultural identity as an important basis for their customary natural resource management.

Since that time, the villagers have succeeded in re- establishing environmentally friendly utilization of natural resources and traditional cultivation practices of crop rotation.

Their efforts at biodiversity protection have already won them the right from the Lore Lindu National Park authorities to go into the surrounding protected forest to collect rattan, bark and other materials for their small-scale craft industries.