Edict banning logging proves no match for greed, poverty
Copyright 2001 South China Morning Post
October 13, 2001
By JASPER BECKER
A national ban on logging announced three years ago is not working, according to mainland experts who also fear forests in neighbouring countries are being targeted to feed China's appetite for timber.
"People ignore the government prohibitions. They are driven by greed," said Zhao Junchen, of the Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences. Mr Zhao is studying the impact of the logging ban on Yunnan. He pointed to the arrest of Communist Party leaders of Gongshan county, bordering Tibet, on charges of illegally logging natural forests.
The ban was announced by Premier Zhu Rongji after the devastating 1998 Yangtze floods. The move has not stopped private companies approaching villages that collectively own 70 per cent of Yunnan's forest reserves.
Local government officials in poor mountainous areas say that without the logging income, they cannot pay their own salaries.
"We used to get 20 per cent of the budget from logging. Now we rely on government subsidies for 100 per cent of our budget," said Zhang Youmin, former head of the local logging company in Deqin county.
A new World Bank report entitled "China: Air, Land and Water" warns of the worsening situation.
"China's natural forests have been in a continuous state of decline for 50 years and there are no signs that the corner on sustainable management of natural forests has been turned," the report says.
It points out that despite a major tree-planting effort, China's state forests suffer from poor management and the absence of a central agency to control natural resources.
Experts say state logging companies have turned their energies to the forests of neighbouring countries like Myanmar, Mongolia and Laos.
"There is such a great demand in China for construction. Businessmen from different parts of the mainland are going to Myanmar, bribing army officers and then sending lumberjacks across the border," Mr Zhao said.
China is the world's third-largest user of timber, with the consumption rate being so high that, as the ban was imposed, experts had predicted supplies would run out in less than 10 years.
Before the ban, China imported about four million cubic metres of timber a year, but by last year this had risen to nearly 15 million cubic metres. Only the United States imports more.
China is reportedly buying hardwood from Malaysia, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and the African state of Gabon, and softwoods such as spruce and fir from Siberia.
The World Bank suggests earlier forestry policies aimed at controlling degradation had the opposite effect.
As far back as 1981, programmes to plant more trees in the upper Yangtze resulted in a marginal rise in forest cover but a dramatic drop in natural forests. From 1985-96, 35 per cent of remaining forests in western Sichuan were cut down.
Heavy flooding in recent years has cost the Chinese economy as much as US$20 billion (HK$155.6 billion). In Yunnan, landslides kill an average of 500 people a year and destroy roads and railways.
Mudslides and collapsing embankments have turned the Golden Sands River, or Jinsha, into the greatest source of sedimentation for the Yangtze, with annual average sedimentation of 280 million tonnes.
In September, Beijing unveiled the Yangtze River Water Conservancy Committee's five-year programme to fight soil erosion. This is part of a larger 15-year scheme launched by the State Forestry Administration that embraces six projects to protect natural forests.
The programme hopes to build a 20-million-hectare shelter belt in northwest, north and northeast China and the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River, and to convert farmland to forest and grassland.
It plans to return 5.3 million hectares of farmland to forest and grassland and plant eight million hectares of barren hills with trees or grass, in 1,108 counties across 24 provinces. Farms for fast-growing trees covering 13 million hectares will be set up to provide 130 million cubic metres annually, meeting up to 40 per cent of the country's demand for timber.
The Yunnan provincial Government is offering seed to persuade farmers to turn hillsides with a grade of 25 degrees into woodland or grassland, equal to about 12.5 per cent of the province's arable land.
Another programme for the Mekong Valley is designed to return forest cover to 50 per cent of the land.
The money is trivial compared with the vast expenditure on dams.
The Mekong forestry scheme will cost 110 million yuan (HK$104 million) a year plus free labour from peasants valued at 120 million yuan. In contrast, China is spending 32 billion yuan building the Xiaowan - a new dam across the Mekong - excluding the cost of auxiliary projects and resettlement of displaced people.
The Xiaowan second in size only to the Three Gorges Dam - is one of 14 planned dams.
The China Yangtze Three Gorges Project Development Corporation announced this year it would build two giant dams on the Golden Sands River, which it said were urgently needed to trap sediment that would otherwise flow into the Three Gorges reservoir.