Scouring the mountains for Burma's brown gold
The Scotsman - United Kingdom; Jul 11, 2001
BY DAMIEN MCELROY IN GUYONG
SKIPPING carefully over rivulets of muddy water for the sake of his brilliant white slacks and polished plastic shoes, Fang Liguo cuts an incongruous figure in this village, home to one of China's poorest mountain tribes. Dead black eyes in deep-lined faces watch the Chinese furniture entrepreneur as he makes his way up the hill to meet the local headman, seeking the roots of a fortune in the damp hills between China and Burma. But the mahogany faces of the locals stir no anthropological interest in him.
Marching past a clutch of men playing cards on the sodden clay, Mr Fang reserves his attention for the hardwood trees that surrounds their rickety wooden shacks. Almost one thousand miles away, in the coastal province of Fujian, he is prospering through making furniture for export, one of China's fastest growing industries. Since a 1998 ban on logging in the upper reaches of its great rivers, the Yangtse and the Yellow, the supply of wood from inland China has dried up. Businessmen like Mr Fang have been reaching to the extremities of the empire to secure their future.
"This area is perfect for me," he said. "I need semi-processed wood. Here there is local supply and steady imports from Burma, more than enough to meet my needs." Along the roads that stretch across the Burmese border, logging is a boom industry. On the hillsides huge sheds with blue corrugated iron roves are spaced just miles apart. Occasionally a huge sign proclaims, as at the gate of the Yongcheng Timber Industry, a multi-million dollar Sino-foreign joint venture. Roadside workshops are filled with sawdust-smeared migrant workers from the great people-producing provinces of Sichuan and Anhui.
China shut down its own logging industry to prevent floods wiping out parts of its most populous cities. It has turned to south-east Asia to make up the shortfall, and its impoverished neighbours have eagerly grasped at the resulting windfall. But in moving to avert an ecological disaster at home, China is stoking a "cataclysm" abroad.
Forest cover in Burma is shrinking rapidly. The monitoring group Rainforest Network estimates that just 30 per cent of the country is wooded today, down from a peak of more than 70 per cent after the Second World War.
In parts of Indonesia, Sumatra and Borneo, the situation is even worse. In a recent report the World Bank warned that lowland forests now the world's "richest source of timber", home to a huge variety of flora and fauna, will be extinct by 2010. The torrid growth of China's furniture business means pressure on south-east Asia's forests will only get worse. Exports grew last year and domestic sales rose even faster spurred by changes in government policy to encourage home ownership. Industry officials date the explosion of timber imports directly to the decision to ban logging across most of China."They cut tariffs to zero after the floods. It was unilateral disarmament," said Betsy Ward, executive director of the American Forest and Paper Association.
China is poised to become the world's biggest importer of logs, figures show. Without urgent action to stop unsustainable logging to meet this huge demand, Indonesia and Burma will be denuded of trees. Burmese teak has been popular in China since the reign of the emperor Quailing (1736-1799), who imported it on the back of an elephant, to make beds for his concubines. Officially, Burma supplies 10 per cent of the logs used in China but the real figure is thought to be much higher.
The government monopoly, the Myanmar Timber Enterprise, still sticks with a 19th century timber selection system, but the Burmese warlords stripping the hills along the Chinese border pay no heed to the rules of sustainable development.
According to one businessman, local chieftains are constantly expanding their territory only to be beaten back. A deal to extract logs from a particular patch must be rapidly executed for it's hard to know how long the warlord will hold his ground. The extinction of its teak forests would be a devastating blow for Burma's already feeble economy. A ton the "brown gold", sells for Pounds 1,500. Timber exports last year topped Pounds 200 million, a quarter of the country's total exports.