Paul French says that China’s eucalypt could be as damaging as Malaysia’s palm oil
Ethical Corporation readers will be familiar with the ongoing arguments over palm oil cultivation, its destruction of the Borneo rainforests, large swathes of Malaysia and Indonesia, and Greenpeace’s campaign targeting Nestlé.
Palm oil is perhaps the best-known example of the spread of monoculture plantations driven by big business in Asia, but others, less well reported, are causing disaster, distress and tragedy.
Five of China’s south-western provinces – Yunnan, Guizhou, Guangxi, Sichuan and Chongqing – are currently undergoing what Chinese meteorologists are describing as a once-in-a-century drought.
This is a very poor part of China – typically farming families earn about $900 a year growing sugar cane, grain or corn. However, in recent years some farmers have substantially upped their incomes in Guangxi by planting and harvesting eucalypt. Some farmers report annual earnings of $6,300 on plantations of between three and four hectares.
Naturally, cash-strapped farmers have dumped growing traditional crops for eucalypt. As well as converting their own arable land, they have cleared native forests to provide more space for growth. Guangxi, Hainan Island and Yunnan now account for two-thirds of China’s eucalypt forests.
The result, combined with lower than average rainfalls, has been drought, crop devastation and myriad personal tragedies for farming communities. Eucalypt plantations consume more water than other trees, because of their rapid growth – a eucalypt tree can be ready to log in under five years. Farmers say that at night they can actually hear the eucalypt trees growing outside their bedroom windows.
APP – more powerful than ever
And who wants all this eucalypt? The pulp and paper industry. Many paper mills are involved in China’s eucalypt business but none more so than Asia Pulp & Paper (APP), part of Indonesia’s massive Sinar Mas Group.
Back in 2003 APP announced a massive investment in Guangxi to build an integrated forestry, pulp and paper project that involved planting hundreds of thousands of acres of eucalypts. The project was eventually suspended by the Chinese authorities after accusations of illegal logging, but the pulp and paper companies are still the major customer for all the small eucalypt farmers across the region.
Despite the terrible drought it seems likely that eucalypt planting and harvesting will continue. Not all scientists agree that eucalypts are to blame, though most believe they are the major contributing factor to the severity of the ongoing drought.
The Chinese government is deeply and closely involved in the eucalypt business. Despite the drought, and the science, the authorities in Guangxi still see eucalypt as a way to lift the province out of dire poverty – they have vowed to raise revenues from the eucalypt crop 240% by 2015, which will involve turning over a massive amount of land to the crop. This amounts to something like 600,000 hectares of new eucalypt plantations in southern China rising to 900,000 by 2020, all or mostly around the city of Nanning, Guangxi’s capital. The seven counties currently worst affected by the drought are all close to Nanning.
More eucalypt plantations seem likely but there is some opposition from within the government. Two senior local officials in Nanning issued a report circulated at a meeting of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (China’s Communist party dominated parliament). This revealed that commercial timber firms accounted for over 70% of forests around Nanning – and 80% of that forest was now eucalypt.
The report was reprinted in the Journal of the CPPCC last year and accused the eucalypt plantations of large-scale deforestation, soil degeneration and reducing water table levels. Similarly others have pointed out that eucalypts need large amounts of synthetic fertilisers, which have significantly polluted rivers and water sources, destroying sources of drinking and agricultural water across the provinces where eucalypt plantations now dominate.
The drought is terrible and many are pointing the finger at the eucalypt plantations and the timber, pulp and paper firms that encourage them. However, try telling a farmer whose income just went from under $1,000 to over $6,000 to stop planting eucalypts without offering an alternative source of income and the answer is not always a sympathetic one.
Based in China for more than 20 years, Paul French is a partner in the research publisher Assess Asia.