This article responds to the critique of data on population displacements voiced in the article 'Are Central Africa's Protected Areas Displacing Hundreds of Thousands of Rural Poor?' (hereinafter Curran et al. 2009) and an earlier version of the same paper with the title 'Central Africa's Protected Areas and the Purported Displacement of People' (hereinafter Maisels et al. 2007). Both articles cast doubt upon the data collected in the field by me and my research assistants. While we have shown that large numbers of people have been physically and economically displaced from 12 protected areas in Central Africa (for example, Schmidt-Soltau 2003, 2005; Cernea & Schmidt-Soltau 2006), my critics claim that not a single person was displaced from at least 10 of the 12 protected areas covered in our 1996-2007 research. [While the critics claimed earlier that they 'can find no unequivocal evidence of people having been forcibly or involuntarily displaced from the (12) protected areas cited by the authors' (Maisels et al. 2007: 75), they have slightly modified their view and claim in this volume that 10 of the 12 'protected areas do not have such a (resettlement) policy for one obvious reason: despite the assertions to the contrary, resettlement has not happened, nor is it planned, in any of these sites' (Curran et al. 2009: 4).] Throughout their articles, the critics attempt to dispute the data and through this process try to discredit the inevitable conclusions that result from these data and the convergent empirical findings of many other researchers. Ultimately, the critics suggest that calling for a conservation that 'strive to contribute to poverty reduction at the local level and at the very minimum must not contribute to or exacerbate poverty' (WPC 2003 Recommendation 29) is meaningless as according to them we challenge a practice which is not real but only 'purported'. ['These papers challenge the purported practice of sovereign states, often supported by conservation NGOs, to designate protected areas without discussion with or providing compensation to people living nearby' (Curran et al. 2009: 1).] This is in fact the same old position that ignores and denies the impoverishment caused by protected areas instead of acknowledging and addressing this unpleasant reality in order to find mutual acceptable solutions. While we thought that this position has been repeatedly and convincingly refuted and that conservation Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) would focus after the World Park Congress in Durban (WPC 2003) on corrective actions and pro-poor conservation, the denials are repeated time and again in complete ignorance of what had been discussed and agreed upon. This is unfortunate from a societal perspective as it slows down the shift towards pro-poor conservation and from a personal perspective as I have worked with most of the critics over the last decade and considered some of them to be friends.