A/59/258 moral ownership belongs to the community. This has often been recognized in the national legal system, but just as often certain kinds of economic interests have attempted to turn communal possession into individual private ownership, a process which began during the colonial period in many countries and intensified during post-colonial times. 15. Indigenous peoples everywhere have been gradually dispossessed of their ancestral lands. The defence of their farming and territorial rights is one of the most urgent issues involved in the protection of their human rights, often giving rise to negotiations, disputes and conflicts. The Special Rapporteur has gathered a wealth of documentation and information concerning these questions in all the countries he visited during the three years of his mandate. In some places the courts have handed down sentences favourable to indigenous rights (as in Canada, Colombia and the Philippines), while in others indigenous peoples have had to apply for the protection of the international courts, as in the case of the Awas Tingni in Nicaragua before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. 16. The demand by indigenous peoples for the recognition of their ancestral lands sometimes brings them into conflict with the interests of States, which may consider that such recognition undermines the unity and integrity of the nation. However, examples such as that of the Nunavut in Canada demonstrate that recognizing indigenous land rights does not detract from the unity of the State and may, at the same time, satisfy the demands and aspirations of an aboriginal people. 17. The land rights issue cannot be separated from the issue of access to, and use of natural resources by indigenous communities, and is an essential issue for the survival of indigenous peoples, which must be carefully studied, since access to the natural resources present in their habitats is essential to their economic and social development. 18. One issue that concerns indigenous communities relates to the planning, design and execution of major development projects on their lands. Wherever large-scale projects are executed in areas occupied by indigenous peoples, it is likely that their communities will undergo profound social and economic changes that the competent authorities are often incapable of understanding, much less anticipating. Sometimes the impact will be beneficial, very often it is devastating, but it is never negligible. That is why, in his second report to the Commission on Human Rights, the Special Rapporteur focused on the impact of major development projects on the human rights of indigenous peoples. Indigenous peoples bear a disproportionate share of the social and human costs of resource-intensive and resource-extractive industries, large dams and other infrastructure projects, logging and plantations, bioprospecting, industrial fishing and farming, and also eco-tourism and imposed conservation projects. 19. No activity has better illustrated this situation than the construction of large multipurpose dams that affect indigenous areas. The second report of the Special Rapporteur provides information on the effects of dams on indigenous peoples in Costa Rica, Chile, Colombia, India and the Philippines, among others. It also reports on the effects of other kinds of major development activities on indigenous peoples’ rights, such as the Puebla Panama Plan in Mesoamerica. 20. The principal effects of these projects for indigenous peoples relate to loss of traditional territories and land, eviction, migration and eventual resettlement, 7