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
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.
Presenter:Sen Lam
Speaker: Jefferson M. Fox, senior fellow at the East West Centre in Hawaii
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.
1 comment:
hunxen always depend on yuon without yuon CPP will die. The Criminal People Party= these yuon slave are here to destroy khmerlands.
Post a Comment