Asia's rubber plantations threaten biodiversity

May 27, 2009
ABC Radio Australia

A scientific report just out, has warned that rubber plantations are expanding rapidly in Southeast Asia, especially in the Indo-China region, and that this may have devastating environmental consequences. The report in Science magazine says more than 500-thousand hectares may have been already converted in the uplands of China, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Burma.

Presenter:Sen Lam
Speaker: Jefferson M. Fox, senior fellow at the East West Centre in Hawaii

Click here to listen to the audio program (Windows Media)

FOX: Well, what we really caught is the mountainous portion of mainland South East Asia or 'Montane' mainland. It's not just traditional Indo-china which I interpreted meaning Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. And we include in this this definition of our region, the most southern portion of Yunnan, Xishuangbanna, which is where the Chinese went in and started rubber plantations in the 1950s, which was very unheard of at that time. Rubber was seen as being more tropical and it was planted in Peninsula Malaysia, southern Thailand, Indonesia. But the Chinese said we need some of our own rubber for national defence purposes and said Xishuangbanna and Hainan Island are our most tropical regions and they went in and established plantations and did some of their own research and developed more cold-tolerant varieties of rubber. So today in Xishuangbanna, basically everything that is not a protected landscape and lies within about 300 metres to 1200 metres wherever the freezing line happens to be is wall-to-wall rubber. So over there, it is clearly a juggernaut.

LAM; So how is this bad for the environment?

FOX: Well, we've done some work, our work in China was cut off early, but our works suggest that.. Rubber as you know, is introduced from Brazil, it's not native to the region. The trees in the region tend to respond to the monsoon. They may drop their leaves during the dry season and they don't flush again until the rainy season sets in. But there is not a monsoon in Brazil and it seems that the trees there respond to daylight length. So at the Spring equinox we begin to get flushing and that's what we see here. So it is at the peak of the dry season, we're seeing rubber begin to flush leaves and draw on deep groundwater reserves for the water it needs. And so, by extension we argue that if you convert your landscape to rubber, your dry season water shortage is probably going to be greater than it has been in the past. We've only got one or two years worth to research on that but are continuing to do more. But as you convert the plantations, you have more roads, you have erosion associated with roads, you have to terrace the rubber plantations. When I say plantations, I don't mean only large government or private enterprise plantations. There is many small-holders across the region too and when you unite their land from one to the next, it becomes plantation, in its formation.

LAM: But as I understand it, commodity prices, certainly rubber prices have fallen drastically compared to the hey day of say the 1960s for instance. But obviously these smallholders still find a valuable cash crop to cultivate?

FOX: I have not looked at rubber prices this week, but they did fall in the fall (autumn) when we had the economic crisis set in. But at least in the American papers today, we had an article on how well the car industry is doing in China. And that of course is going to overtake the US car industry. You have to have some natural rubber for car tyres and so rubber prices, as I understand, have rebounded and are doing well again today.

LAM: Is there evidence of forests being cleared for these plantations? Is there evidence of new plantations cropping up?

FOX: Where the forest set is being cleared is a secondary forest that is associated with the traditional agricultural system that was found in this region, which was shifting agriculture, swidden or slash and burn, for the derogative term. And that tree cover was there because of that type of land use system, they had abandoned the land and allowed it to lay fallow and so we had tree cover associated with that. And when we converted it to rubber, we lose the native vegetation, we replace it with an introduced tree cover in our monoculture.

LAM: Is it to simplistic to say swidden agriculture is probably more preferable in environmental terms, compared to rubber plantations?

FOX: It's probably to simplistic to say that. But we do try to make the point that swidden did have its good points and there is an awful lot of bio-diversity associated with swidden, including the different types of trees that were allowed to regenerate. Of course as well as the agro-biodiversity, we will lose a large portion of that as we go to mono-cultures. The erosion associated with swidden of course dependent on how intensely the swidden is and the length of the fallow period. But in most of the swidden systems we have monitored, even under fallows, three, four year fallows, the erosion is high the first year when its cleared, but then drops off to very quickly. So it's arguable that swidden probably has less erosion than some of these commercial crops that we seeing today.

Tread Heavily: China's Tire Demand Rolls over Southeast Asian Forests

Ravaged by rubber In the Chinese province of Xishuangbanna, terraced rubber plantations have replaced swidden fields and secondary forests. (Photo: Alan Ziegler)

China's thirst for rubber is destroying the environment -- and livelihoods -- in Southeast Asia.

May 21, 2009
By Brendan Borrell
Scientific American

Geographer Jefferson Fox thought he was on to something big when the Chinese military stripped his team's weather monitoring equipment from a montane rubber plantation in the run-up to last year's Olympics. How big? In the past 20 years, more than 1.2 million acres (485,000 hectares) of evergreen broadleaf and secondary forests have been cleared throughout Southeast Asia to make way for rubber plantations to fuel China's growing appetite for automobile tires.

Fox—who is based at the East West Center in Honolulu—warns in Science this week that the environmental consequences of these massive land use changes, particularly on water resources, could be devastating.

Economists are also sounding the alarm, cautioning in a series of articles set to be published in Human Ecology that government policies that have forced these farmers to abandon traditional agriculture practices will leave them vulnerable to future fluctuations in rubber prices.

Swidden, or slash-and-burn, agriculture was once practiced throughout the world as a means to cultivate on otherwise infertile soils. But with the rise of modern agricultural techniques, Europeans began to view it as an abominable and primitive practice. As Capt. P. Cupet, a member of France's Pavie Mission to Indochina in the late 19th century once wrote, "These savages are the greatest destroyers of forests I know."

But Fox and his two coauthors believe these "savages" were better at preserving biodiversity than current land-use practices encouraging monoculture, or single-crop, agricultural development in Southeast Asia. Today, Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand—with international encouragement—have adopted laws that criminalize swidden agriculture, or otherwise restrict land-use options to make the practice impossible. As a result, Fox says that Chinese investors have been able to move in and secure sometimes questionable deals that allow them to develop rubber plantations on lands once populated by leopards, monkeys and tigers.

Rob Cramb, an economist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, agrees that the environmental fallout from the shift is striking, but he is most concerned about the livelihoods of small farmers who have been forced to change their traditional methods. He acknowledges that some may be successful in the short term, but notes that "Having so many livelihoods tied to a single commodity (that is rubber) is potentially very dangerous."

As it turns out, Fox says that he and his colleagues were the victims of a new Chinese government policy that prevents foreigners from collecting meteorological data. Fox's research, funded by the National Science Foundation and NASA, was designed to test his theory that rubber trees, which are exotics from the South America, differ from native vegetation in that they suck up most of their water when the soil is the driest at the beginning of the monsoon season.

This phenomenon could lead to water shortages in the future, and he recommends that farmers continue to cultivate rubber but combine it with other crops and forest types. Because their experiments were cut short, he has set up new weather towers in Thailand and Cambodia to monitor how much water rubber trees absorb compared with native species.

Despite the warnings, Fox says it is unlikely the governments in Southeast Asia will change tack.

"We can report that this is not a good trend for the environment and for people's livelihoods," he says, "but I don't think it's going to stop."

Rubber plantations could have 'devastating' impact in Asia

Friday, May 22, 2009

CHICAGO (AFP) — The expansion of rubber plantations in southeast Asia could have a "devastating" environmental impact, scientists warned Thursday as they pressed for a substantial increase in forest preserves.

More than 500,000 hectares (1.2 million acres) may have already been converted to rubber plantations in the uplands of China, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar.

And researchers predict the area of land dedicated to rubber and other farming systems could more than double or triple by 2050, replacing lands currently occupied by evergreen broadleaf trees and secondary vegetation growing in areas subjected to slash-and-burn farming.

That could result in a significant reduction in carbon biomass, dessicate the region's water systems, and increase the risk of landslides through erosion, researchers from China, Singapore and the US warned in an essay in the journal Science.

"The unrestricted expansion of rubber in montane mainland southeast Asia could have devastating environmental effects," wrote lead author Alan Ziegler of the National University of Singapore.

Ziegel and his colleagues warned "time is too short" to wait for results from studies aimed providing reliable assessments of the impact on water systems.

"A substantial increase in natural reserve areas could help to reduce the threats to biodiversity and carbon stocks," they wrote.

The authors also suggested promoting "diversified agroforestry systems in which cash crops such as rubber and oil palm play important roles, but are not planted as monocultures."