Protection, Production, or Real Estate?

New approaches and threats to biodiversity protection in Xishuangbanna

by

Dr. Josef Margraf

Ecologist

TianZi Biodiversity Research & Development Centre

Xishuangbanna, Yunnan, China

 

Hypothesis

"The closer a farming system in tropical areas is to the structure and species composition of the original rain forest the more sustainable it is" has been the hypothesis of a successful long-term and scientifically guided development project (Margraf 1997). Learning from the project reveals that its economic viability rests much on three major pillars:

1               the country's policies need to favor ownership and trade of natural resources;

2               the knowledge on the potential and actual use of hundreds of forests products per site needs to be available, including technologies of production and processing; and

3               marketing channels need to consciously be opened for both traditional and novel products.

Under such favorable conditions, farmers are willing to consider secondary forest land like home gardens, communal forests, and shifting cultivation sites as part of their farming systems Ð a tree-based farming system, which is producing an astounding number of commercially marketable crops. These range from wood to fibre, oil, medicine, tea, dies, fruits, nuts, edible insects, and horticultural crops.

To manage such complex ecosystems requires less knowledge than it may seem from the long list of products. In most cases management can be reduced to enrichment planting and selective support of wanted species, as they grow best under the natural conditions of a forest ecosystem in the first place.

What such farming systems give back to society, however, goes much beyond the economic and social benefits of a rural society: it harbors the otherwise eroding genetic resources of a country.

The case of Xishuangbanna

Yunnan's tropical Xishuangbanna, nestled between Laos and Myanmar, a few hundred km North of Thailand, has all the potential to function as a natural ecological gene bank for China's warm and humid climatic areas. In the real world of an awakening economy, which looks for gains in large-scale production of cheap goods, however, its tropical soils are used to compete in world markets of other country's indigenous products.

Examples are: rubber plantations (destroying the biodiversity of about 2 third of the autonomous Prefecture's area with dramatically increasing trend; from Brasilia), sugar cane (consuming the most fertile of hills and even rice fields, leaving the impoverished and eroded; from the Pacific islands), pine apple (often on steep mountain sites, clear cut for this sweet fruit; from South America), Eucalyptus species (particularly in adjacent Simao area, used to feed an Indonesian paper mill; from Australia).

These figures are the more dramatic as they represent the ultimate thread to the area's particularly high species numbers that depend on the intact ecosystem structures.

Biogeographically, Xishuangbanna is located at a transitional zone between tropical SE Asia, subtropical East Asia and mainland China, and the Himalayan climatic region. Southern Yunnan is, therefore, a key area in biogeography and a hotspot for biodiversity.

The flora of the region consists of 3,336 native seed plant species belonging to 1,140 genera in 197 families.

Dendrobium devonianum is one of the highly sought for orchid species of Xishuangbanna because of its medicinal use and high price. Consequently, the species - like most others from the same genus of 43 known species in Xishuangbanna alone - have been brought close to extinction in China and are now destroyed in the neighboring Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam.

There are about 550 species of vertebrates (400 bird species, 45 reptile species, 28 mammals, and a yet undefined number of fish) recorded in Xishuangbanna, which make up 1/4 of the total vertebrates and 1/3 of the birds of China.

114 animal species are rare and endangered, comprising 28% of the total species. 57 plant species are rare and endangered, making up 22% of the 254 species, which are under national protection in Xishuangbanna.

Nature Reserves are only part of the answer

Nature Reserves are important as they guarantee a degree of protection that otherwise would not be possible. Naturally, they are located in areas, where traditionally there has been little access for logging and farming. Hence, there is a concentration of reserves on mountain ridges, particularly along borders between countries and provinces.

Map of Xishuangbanna's nature reserves (from Biodiversity Corridors Project, ADB); note the disconnectedness of most nature reserves, making it impossible for species to migrate to other reserves and keep genetic viability high.

Consequently the majority of genetic erosion has taken place in fertile lowlands, along rivers and coastlines, and on volcanic soils. To stem the trend of species loss in these areas, agriculture needs to play a major role in species protection, and a good start is the conservation and active support to the production of what is called "Agro-biodiversity". Although the concept needs much widening: organic farming practices actively support weed and predator-pest communities. In the tropical areas, the line between agriculture and forest land needs to be given up as many traditional crops are in fact forest plants and require partial shading to thrive well. This re-definition of forests versus farm land also poses a challenge administratively, as conventionally two different Government Units are in charge, usually with conflicting policies and interests.

Private initiatives

It is increasingly called upon the private sector to take responsibility in the global task of biodiversity protection. To many industries in the pharmaceutical and health products area this is an understood task, and international certificates can be obtained if product chains are geared towards species protection.

The responsibilities seem less obvious in the food industry, as by tradition the elimination of nature, called shade, weeds, and pests, are part of industrialized production processes.

What is even more surprising is that also in the forest business, biodiversity is an unwanted disturbance, because production forests still rely on mono culture, in most cases of tropical countries on using alien species. The secondary forests of Yunnan are presently under serious threat from commercial pulp wood production and in the forest statistics of Xishuangbanna, rubber plantations are still qualified as "forests". In a nutshell, the privatisation of the rubber estates have led to an even more fierce destruction of local forests as ownerships and responsibilities remained tied to those institutions taking decision on forest use rights.

With new State policies emerging, which give ownership status also to reclassified secondary forest land, new commercial endeavors are likely to come up. Such initiatives may range from species production to "forest real estate" speculation.

Opportunities ahead

Times of globalisation and a world wide access to information opens new possibilities to remote areas. Not only will it be perceivable and even likely that farmers - even marginal farmers - will in the near future be equipped with computers, but this will also give them a chance to offer their products on the internet and - vice versa - allow companies to get in touch with the farmers more directly for contract growing and price negotiations.

This will alter the word of trade substantially. Opportunities that arise from it and from current trends in world demands are:

Oil forest farms
While the crude oil prices on the world markets are climbing closer to the price of vegetable oils, the car and machine producing industries are developing engines that can be fed on vegetable oils. To produce such oil with annual crops is clearly non-sustainable because their input needs and forms of land management are quite energy consuming and erosion prone.

This is different with tree based oil crops and with oil producing vines that can additionally climb on trees. China has some excellent tree based oil crops (e.g. Camellia oleifera) and some outstanding oil producing vines (e.g. Hodgsonia macrocarpa).

CO2 absorption forests
The concept of fixing CO2 in wood biomass is getting momentum in industrialized countries. It is envisioned that CO2 exhaustion be traded against CO2 absorption on a global scale. This will give income opportunities to land owners and will simultaneously provide habitat for local biodiversity.

Medicinal forests
Many species important for local and official Chinese medicine are growing naturally under forest cover. With the increasing demand for Chinese medicine worldwide, there is a good potential to develop medicine forests which allow harvesting of medicinal products.

Horticultural forests
Chinese forests are rich in species that have a potential for horticultural trade. Rather than producing these species under green house conditions, natural production under forests will earn its own income when certification of ecologically sound production support such schemes and work on the conscience of consumers.

Recycling material forests
With new laws emerging in the industrialized countries, which force producers to take back used and destroyed products, it becomes increasingly important that as many as possible parts of an equipment become recyclable. An interesting start has been made by Mercedes Benz using the fibre of a local Philippine banana species (Musa textilis) to produce parts of their cars. This banana trives best in the shade of forests and its production is such contributing to the protection of forest biodiversity, erosion control, and the water balance of small islands.

Agro-Biodiversity farms
More and more people wish their food would come from healthy resources and that their purchase would contribute to env ironmental protection and fair trade. With increasing knowledge of informed buyers, rare crops become marketable, and the trend of modern crops to eliminate the traditional varieties and food species is slowing down.

Biodiversity estates
A growing number of private citicens are concerned about their environment and are willing to buy forests for the sole purpose of protecting it from destruction. Such schemes are nowadays published on the internet and attract world wide attention.

Needless to add that all these opportunities translate into increased income for local farmers and traders. The dimensions of these trade opportunities go well into billions of US$ and will definitely continue to be eroded away if no strong and immediate approaches will be taken.

Policy adjustments

In a situation where natural resources - notably water, soil, and biodiversity - are getting scarce at a global level, it is increasingly important to carefully assess the potentials and risks of any land use system. In key biodiversity areas as e.g. in tropical countries and highly diverse landscapes it can no longer be left to the decision of the land owner if he wishes to eliminate local biodiversity for industrial production or not. New policies need to take into consideration that biodiversity is a global good, protected by national laws and international conventions. To oversee the implementation of these policies needs to be an integral part of all institutions in charge of land use, be it agriculture, forestry, or water.

While policies are weak when it comes to address field issues, there needs to be a mechanism that is similar to the EIA (environmental impact assessment) of a land use system, and that regularly gives a certification of compliance, which in turn helps marketing products from the attested land use scheme.

Devils in disguise

As in any endeavor that needs to meet economic ends, the temptation to maximize revenue will be high also for schemes geared toward biodiversity protection. This is the more expected as the nature of biodiversity is by definition complex, while commercial schemes have conventionally been simplified endeavors with maximum control over nature.

Biodiversity schemes do not go well with control and are definitely the opposite from simplification. Hence, with all the experience we have so far when economists gain the upper-hand in design, tendencies to strait rows, equal planting distances, leveling of hills, income maximisation, and the ever present temptation to grow a foreign crop will loom behind the money minded designers and owners.

After so many misnomers (like rubber plantations being called "forests" (Xishuangbanna), "forest farms" turning out to be rice paddies and mango plantations (Hainan), "reforestation" justifying logging and plantation of alien tree species (Sichuan), "Ecological area" being a golf course (Yunnan) and so forth) it needs more than a policy to save the remaining biodiversity of China or even of a small prefecture like Xishuangbanna.

It may be argued that the underlying root causes of destruction are misguided value systems as most people or institutions do not work along a goal that defines the sustainability of their operations along ecological, social, and economic parameters. Hence, the results of even the best policies can only bee seen after many years.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that new concepts are needed to enable a country and its people to safe the dwindling genetic resources from falling pray to scrupulous commerce. At a time when economy directs the flow of decisions world wide it seems unreasonable to keep a piece of "worthless biodiversity" when it could be converted into a money making production site.

Therefore, all efforts need to go into making biodiversity profitable. This again must go hand in hand with designing production schemes, which resemble original ecosystems that provide habitat for the large species assembly that can create viable populations inside such novel land use systems.

If designed in accordance with the natural systems of a locality, they will fulfill vital ecosystem functions and may even serve as genetic corridors between separated nature reserves while giving good income to their owners. Last not least, with every lost species the potential for another billion-dollar-business is definitely gone - even though we do not yet know in many cases what this business could exactly have been.

Xishuangbanna is still listed as a Man and Biosphere Reserve. However, concepts to earn the title are absent. A revitalization of the status, turning Xishuangbanna into a true MAB Reserve should be pursued. Ideas could spring form the immense natural potential of the area: Xishuangbanna could be turned into a biodiversity production area, where indigenous ethnic knowledge could be used to revert the battered landscape into an ecological zone of high productivity and immense tourist value for the nation and on a global scale.
A Government supported disincentive to applying agrochemicals would turn the area into China's organic food green house and such open a market that is increasing with the same speed as the present environmental destruction

Whatever ecologically sound way the Prefecture may go: it will need more than the usual fast income strategy to turn the wheel of destruction around, and both Government and the private sector need close cooperation to successfully endeavor into the age of biodiversity business.

 

1st draft July11, 2005