Sustainable forests in Vietnam
Sustainable forests in Vietnam
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From: Dan Tsang <dtsang@uci.edu>
Date: Mon, Jul 24, 2017 at 2:40 AM
To: vsg Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Photo essay in Guardian on acacia timber, a source for IKEA furniture...
Vietnamese smallholders help end deforestation – photo essay
Dan
Daniel C. Tsang,
Distinguished Librarian Emeritus
University of California, Irvine
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From: Tom Miller <milltom@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Jul 24, 2017 at 7:07 AM
To: Dan Tsang <dtsang@uci.edu>
Cc: vsg Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Important to note the distinction between plantation same species forests, which are subject to disease and do not support wild life, and native diversified forests, which are much more resistant to disease, rich in wild life diversity and can be highly profitable as well. Hopefully, Ikea will support these forests as well. An excellent book on the subject is "The Hidden Life of Trees" by German forester Peter Wohlleben.
Tom Miller
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From: Chuck Searcy <chuckusvn@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Jul 24, 2017 at 8:24 AM
To: Tom Miller <milltom@gmail.com>
Cc: vsg Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Very good point, Tom. In Quang Tri, production forests that are closely managed have brought back greenery and what appears to be a much healthier environment than was the case a few decades ago, but rows of rubber trees or planted pines, acacia, eucalyptus dominate in some areas. Further east into the mountains toward Laos the forest appear to be more mixed, less monoculture but that may be because of difficulty in accessing steeper slopes.
Ikea, as a massive global company that is financially successful, is certainly sensitive to CSR (corporate responsibility) pressures, and could likely be persuaded to support balanced initiatives if they were proposed.
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CHUCK SEARCY
International Advisor, Project RENEW
Vice President, VFP Chapter 160
Co-chair, Agent Orange Working Group
71 Trần Quốc Toản
Hà Nội, Việt Nam
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From: Thompson, C. M. <thompsonc2@southernct.edu>
Date: Mon, Jul 24, 2017 at 9:41 AM
To: Tom Miller <milltom@gmail.com>
Cc: vsg Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Dear Tom,
Thanks for starting a conversation about this article and the book you cite is wonderful! However, I don't think that this article, if you read it closely, in any way implies that plantations are the same thing as 'natural' forests however you want to define natural forests. It apprears to me that the program the article is primarily about is the World Wildlife Fund's regional Sustanable Bamboo Acacia and Rattan Project which aims to relieve pressure on 'natural' forests by producing sustainable plantings of products that are often harvested from older, and at least somewhat more 'natural' forests. It also says specifically in the article that such small holder plantings also provide "vital corridors for wildlife."
Surely when you say that
native diversified forests, which are much more resistant to disease, rich in wild life diversity and can be highly profitable as well
you don't mean that it is preferable to support harvesting "native diversified forests"?
I'm sure that scholars such as Pam McElwee could speak to how well this project is actually working on the ground better than I can.
cheers
Michele
Michele Thompson
Professor of Southeast Asian History
Dept. of History
Southern Connecticut State Univ.
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From: Thompson, C. M. <thompsonc2@southernct.edu>
Date: Mon, Jul 24, 2017 at 9:52 AM
To: Chuck Searcy <chuckusvn@gmail.com>
Cc: vsg Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Dear Chuck,
Well it does say in the article that Ikea has committed to buying only from plantations certified by the Forest Stewardship Council and it implies that this is supported by the WWF. So it appears to me that this is Ikea's response to the corporate responsibility issue.
Again there are others on this list who know more than I do about how well these programs are actually working.
cheers
Michele
Michele Thompson
Professor of Southeast Asian History
Dept. of History
Southern Connecticut State Univ.
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From: Pamela McElwee <pdmcelwee@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Jul 24, 2017 at 7:10 PM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
The Guardian article is very misleading and appears to be mostly a press release from the World Wildlife Fund for their project - it implies that certifying acacia plantations as sustainable (mostly for the garden furniture market in the US and Europe) will somehow reduce overall deforestation and serve as regenerated forest corridors for wildlife. Acacia plantations are exotic species monocropped on 5-8 year cycles - I do not think of them as ‘forests’ but rather as a crop like agriculture, albeit with a longer production cycle. Nothing else grows with acacia - purposefully, as it does not tolerate competition - and accordingly acacia plantations are essentially devoid of natural wildlife. Furthermore, acacia does compete with natural forests - a great deal were converted to plantations during the 5 Million Hectare Reforestation Program a few years ago. Finally, acacia is very susceptible to blowdowns during storms - not a good choice for a country facing increased hurricane/rainfall activity under climate change.
It is one thing to promote certification to raise prices for producers, which is a good thing. It is quite another to imply that this is the solution to Vietnam’s deforestation (it is not). I have a whole chapter in my recent book, Forests Are Gold, devoted to the negative environmental and social implications of acacia and eucalyptus plantations in Vietnam.
Pam McElwee
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From: Andrew Wells-Dang <andrewwd@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Jul 25, 2017 at 5:20 AM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
In addition to the points raised by Tom and Pam, the Guardian article isn't entirely accurate in its description of smallholder forest tenure in Vietnam. Rather than "owning most of its plantations", households have only been allocated 26% of forest land (and common community ownership makes up only 2%). The largest areas of forest land - often some of the most valuable, highest quality forest - are held by Forest Management Boards and State Forest Enterprises (together holding 48%) and local People's Committees (16%). When villagers, including indigenous ethnic minorities, enter these forests to gather forest products or engage in rotating upland agriculture, they are labeled "encroachers" or "forest destroyers" (lâm tặc), even when the forests are their traditional customary lands.
I agree with Pam's critique of tree plantations masquerading as forests, but once villagers have been allocated forest land, they also need to make a livelihood, and in this sense at least, growing acacia is better than complete exclusion from the land. We should look for better alternatives that both protect the environment and benefit forest communities.
(The source for the above statistics is a 2015 Government report to the National Assembly on management of state farms and forest enterprises. The rates of forest allocation vary a lot by province and region of Vietnam.)
Andrew Wells-Dang
Governance adviser, Oxfam in Vietnam
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From: Thompson, C. M. <thompsonc2@southernct.edu>
Date: Tue, Jul 25, 2017 at 6:15 AM
To: Pamela McElwee <pdmcelwee@gmail.com>
Cc: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Dear Pam,
Thanks very much for all this information on how these programs are actually working out!
cheers
Michele
Michele Thompson
Professor of Southeast Asian History
Dept. of History
Southern Connecticut State Univ.
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From: Wynn Gadkar-Wilcox <WilcoxW@wcsu.edu>
Date: Tue, Jul 25, 2017 at 6:25 AM
To: "Thompson, C. M." <thompsonc2@southernct.edu>, Pamela McElwee <pdmcelwee@gmail.com>
Cc: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Dear Colleagues:
Andrew notes that " We should look for better alternatives that both protect the environment and benefit forest communities."
As an observer who knows very little about contemporary issues related to forest conservation in Vietnam, I would be very interested in hear more about what the experts on this list think those alternatives are, or ought to be.
Cheers,
Wynn
Wynn Gadkar-Wilcox
Professor of History and Non-Western Cultures
Western Connecticut State University
181 White Street
Danbury, CT 06810
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From: Pamela McElwee <pdmcelwee@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, Jul 27, 2017 at 4:52 PM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Wynn asked about alternatives to the current approach of forest management in Vietnam. This is actually a question I have been asked a lot since writing my book, which is mostly about the problems of environmental management, and not very much about solutions, unfortunately. But I would say that I have seen some examples of where there is a decent balance between trying to improve livelihoods and get some environmental benefit, although they are few and far between.
The major challenge for the forest sector is that a large amount of land is still held by the state, many in inefficient State Forest Enterprises that Andrew alluded to in his email. They are often subsidized excessively, overcut logs tremendously, and generally waste money for little or no benefit, other than to prop up local cadres who want to keep their state pensions for working for the state (and selling logs corruptly on the side). The SFEs that are are in environmentally sensitive areas should be off limits to logging and turned into conservation zones and the rest handed over to households to manage for additional livelihoods. Forestry is such a long term investment that smallholders are reluctant to take it on - so institutional support and loans to make it viable are essential. Especially for native species, we are talking 30-50 year logging cycles, rather than the 5-7 with acacia, so it’s really important to provide smallholders with interim livelihoods - perhaps agricultural crops in before young forests until the canopy closes, then something else while waiting for forest harvesting. It’s not an easy livelihood.
There are also some successful community forestry models (mostly in the Northern mountains) where whole villages take on the long term investments, and rely on social appropriation and sanctions to ensure protection, which are far more effective that state rangers. Many ethnic minorities still retain strong spiritual and religious beliefs about forests and the spirits within, and protect remnant patches rather well as spirit forests, forest cemeteries, and other models. They are not extensive but they do provide environmental services to local people and habit for local wildlife.
There are co-management models for shrimp production and mangrove protection in the Mekong Delta that seem to be providing incentives to maintain some mangrove cover yet still allow shrimp production using a 70/30 model (70% land under mangrove, the rest under shrimp). Ca Man has done this most effectively. Costs are higher for farmers, but if they can get higher prices for shrimp (e.g. certification) then they think it is worth it.
Finally, the payment for ecosystem services (PES) program that the government has rolled out in the past 10 years has a number of problems, but one area that does seem to be working is some national parks and conservation zones use PES money to pay local people to patrol state forest, essentially forming local ranger services. These guys are decently effective, although they don’t have much power against mafioso who often show up to log in stealth, but they do have a deterrence value for opportunistic loggers.
In other words, there are a lot of small scale models, but none are particularly widespread, which is unfortunate.
Best,
Pam McElwee, Rutgers
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From: Greg Nagle <gnagle2000@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Aug 27, 2017 at 10:57 AM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
A month ago we were talking about problems with acacia plantations in Vietnam and I replied in detail not understanding that my things would just go to the sender, not the VSG.
I am a forester and although pleased to see the progress with reforestation, this particular acacia is not native to VN but is found in New Guinea and Australia/ And as Pamela pointed out, it is a monoculture and not so appealing ecologically The vegetation it replaced in some areas may also have had much environmental value.
Having seen enough rapacious tractor logging in my years in the Northwest, I was disappointed to see how badly they were doing with it on the slopes around the Ashau Valley. They need to move into using cable yarding with is now standard practice in many other countries and much reduces damage to soils
But many of those planted areas had been heavily sprayed with Agent Orange and reverted to shrubs and savannah. Natural regeneration of trees was probably hindered by recurrent fires,
Overall, a step forward but not such good forestry practices as yet.
Attached is a pic of before and after on the road to A Luoie, Those steep slopes were being harvested a year ago
I have many more pics on this issue in the Ashau valley.
Photo by Phuung Tuu Boi
I am not sure this photo will make it through
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From: Greg Nagle <gnagle2000@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Aug 27, 2017 at 11:24 AM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
In the southern Ashau they are using PES for watershed forest protection with money going to some community groups which also make some cash from the mostly Viet tourism, Unlike many other places the Ashau also has some potential for tourism, with a new hot springs resort near community forest area. I cant judge how well it is working but in years past there was illegal logging in the community area which has stopped. They also have small areas of rubber and acacia.
But most of the land is under control of the government and some illegal logging of large natural forest continues
Given the fact that so much of the plantations were on the agent orange shrub/imperata grass areas, I offer that converting those to plantations was a win. It was always possible to reforest them by hand but it needed a lot of funds for labor.
( I should note that there are plenty of other shrub/grasslands in northern Vietnam and the highlands of SE Asia that have nothing to do with agent orange. Based on analysis of French aerial photos from 1954, much of the lower slopes and bottom of the Ashau vallley was like that long before the war and I assume recurrent fires kept them that way. (??). In some areas there was actually recovery of forest during the US war since the people fled the bombing)
Around the northern Hoa Binh reservoir with its large hydro plant, a few years ago there was $180 million n PES collected from power users which was waiting for a dispersal mechanism to get it out into the communities>.
I am not sure how this worked out on a large scale but the consensus was that putting it into community hands was the best approach. It could use some critical scrutiny.
Not having had anyone to talk with on these issues which have vexed me for years, I am overdoing it but I have a lot of questions. Attached is a report on the acacia plantations. One of the authors is a French woman who did her PhD work on vegetation changes in the Ashau Valley since 1954.
I welcome contrary views.
A question I have had for years is why more of the sprayed areas did not show more robust recovery of forests in the Ashau, some did come back while others didn;t. I attribute this to fires based on what Phuung Tuu Boi told me. I need to state emphatically that this lack of recovery was not due to toxic impacts to soils, We have plenty of data on dioxin levels across the Ashau valley and serious contamination sites are limited to spill areas, The Ashau has been sampled more for dioxin than any other sprayed rural area in Vietnam.
It seems that many other shifting cultivation areas across SE Asia do come back to forest with large variations, Why?
Here is a piece of the acacia publication below
As plantation species go, the acacia seems far preferable to pine and eucalyptus due to acacia's nitrogen fixing.
On the hillsides closest to the plain, the severely
eroded soils have been impoverished for centuries by
human pressures (photograph 7). Acacia spp. is helping to
restore their fertility thanks to the symbiotic relationship
between its nodulated roots and rhizobial bacteria fixing
nitrogen in the soil. In hybrid acacias, these root nodes are
two to four times more heavy and numerous than in related
species (Le Dinh, 2009). In plantations, however, the
atmospheric nitrogen fixing properties of A. mangium is
mostly inversely proportional to the nitrogen content of the
soil (Galiana et al., 1996). This is increased by acacias
thanks to their leaf litter, which averages 50% of fixed nitrogen
(ibid.) in the case of A. mangium. The production of A.
mangium and A. auriculiformis leaf litter over 7 to 8 years is
comparable to that in moist tropical forests in soils of low to
average fertility (Bernhard-Reversat et al., 1993). The
provincial authorities, in citing this as a reason for abando -
ning eucalyptus in favour of acacia plantations (Snnvptnt,
2002), are thus showing concern for improving soils and for
the environment more generally.
Acacia plantations are helping to increase forested areas
(figure 4). This pattern of recolonisation, spearheaded by fastgrowing
heliophyllous species, is also fostering the reintroduction,
through plantations, of local shade-loving woody
species.