04 Nov 2010: Report
In War-Scarred Landscape,
Vietnam Replants Its Forests
With large swaths of forest destroyed by wartime defoliants, and even larger areas lost to post-war logging, Vietnam has set an ambitious goal for regenerating its woodlands. But proponents of reintroducing native tree species face resistance from a timber industry that favors fast-growing exotics like acacia.
On a muggy morning near Vinh Cuu, a town about 60 miles north of Ho Chi Minh City in southern Vietnam, a blue Toyota pickup whizzed by dense tropical scrub. The nearest city was Bien Hoa, home of an American air base during the Vietnam War. Today, the surrounding countryside is a patchwork of villages, farms, and recovering forests.
Inside the truck, workers from the Vinh Cuu Nature Reserve were trading war stories, recalling that the region was once a hotbed of fighting. The surrounding forest had served as a haven for the Viet Cong; 10 miles away the Communist guerillas had dug a network of tunnels.
The road turned to clay and snaked into a dense bamboo canopy. When the forest gave way to fields, the truck stopped on a stretch of road that straddled two tree plantations — one of imported Australian acacia, and the other of a native hardwood, Hopea odorata, also known as thingan or takian.
Thirty-five years after North Vietnamese tanks entered Ho Chi Minh City — formerly Saigon — and four decades after U.S. forces destroyed or
Defoliants destroyed about 7,700 square miles of forests — six percent of Vietnam’s land area.damaged large swaths of Vietnamese forest with bombs and defoliants, this landscape is a window into Vietnam’s struggle to regenerate its once-abundant forests. With much of the country’s woodlands and jungle lost or damaged over the past half-century by war, the spread of agriculture, and logging, Vietnam’s forestry experts are split over what the nation’s new forests should look like.
On the one side are those who would replace the lost forests with acacia and eucalyptus plantations — alien, monocultural forms of regeneration that supply abundant wood products but support little biodiversity. On the other side are scientists and conservationists who would like to regenerate forests of Hopea odorata and other native species, which are slow-growing but support a far wider variety of indigenous plants, animals, birds, and insects.
“The American army used planes to kill our forests,” said Tran Van Mui, director of the Vinh Cuu Nature Reserve, which since 2009 has promoted a $1.5 million program of native tree reintroduction among villagers. “Now I’d like to return to natural forests. The hopea is a big tree with a long life.”
By some estimates, forest cover in Vietnam declined by 50 percent between 1945 and 1980. During the Vietnam War, U.S. forces sprayed 72 million liters of herbicides, including Agent Orange, on the Vietnamese countryside and dropped roughly 13 million tons of bombs, according to Jakarta-based forestry expert Chris Lang. An Australia-based forestry expert, Tran Lam Dong, reports that defoliants destroyed about 7,700 square miles of forests — six percent of Vietnam’s total land area.
But in recent decades, logging and the conversion of woodlands to agricultural fields has done more damage to Vietnam’s forests than wartime defoliation and bombing. From 1980 to 1990, forest cover in
Southeast Asia’s native forests are ‘among the fastest disappearing in the world,’ says one expert.Vietnam declined from 32 percent to 27 percent of the country. The International Union for Conservation of Nature said in 1998 that a “long period of selective logging” had reduced Vietnam’s Hopea odorata stock to “small groups of trees or isolated individuals.” The Viet Nam News reported this month that illegal logging was so rampant in 2010 that four forest rangers had been killed and 44 injured trying to stop it.
Hopea odorata is a species in the Dipterocarp genus, a family of large tropical hardwoods native to the lowland forests of Southeast Asia. The tree — “Sao Den,” or “black star,” in Vietnamese — was popular in traditional Vietnamese economies because it resists termites. Hopea logs were made into canoe-like boats that once ferried rice and coal around southern Vietnam’s Mekong Delta.
These native stands of trees have been badly decimated not only in Vietnam but across all of Southeast Asia. Although the Dipterocarp forests of Southeast Asia support a “substantial proportion of the world’s biodiversity,” they are “among the fastest disappearing in the world,” according to Switzerland-based researcher Chris Kettle.
Vietnam’s forest recovery efforts have been driven in part by Phung Tuu Boi, a forester who experimented with various regeneration projects after the war. He worked with Australian colleagues to plant Australian acacia and eucalyptus trees in deforested areas of central and southern Vietnam. Unlike hopea — which can’t easily re-colonize degraded landscapes because they are insect-pollinated and have poor seed-dispersal capabilities — acacia and eucalyptus seedlings grew easily in soils degraded by logging and herbicides.
Photo by Mike Ives
Phung Tuu Boi stands in front of a hopea tree at the Forest Inventory and Planning Institute in Hanoi.
Boi and others have long realized that importing Australian exotics was just a partial solution. Although the trees were good for business — by 2008, 850,000 hectares of domestic acacia and eucalyptus trees were supporting Vietnam’s $185 million-per-year wood-chip export industry — it became clear that acacia and eucalyptus monocultures didn’t protect watersheds or conserve biodiversity as native trees did.
Unlike native Dipterocarps, acacias block indigenous trees, shrubs, and lianas (woody vines) from growing underneath them, which eliminates the habitat of native insects, vertebrates and fungi; reduce biodiversity; and lead to species extinction. In Brunei, a study has shown that acacias convert disturbed forests into “nearly mono-specific stands.”
Boi, now 70 and semi-retired from Vietnam’s Forest Inventory and Planning Institute, hopes that as trees like Hopea odorata are planted across central and southern Vietnam in coming decades, stands of Australian trees will gradually yield to healthy native forests. But at the moment, he said, “biodiversity isn't good there — there are no birds or wildlife.”
Reintroducing native Dipterocarps in Vietnam — under a communist, one-party government — isn’t as transparent or straightforward a project as it might be in a developed country. Notably, the Vietnamese government scientists interviewed for this article suggest that Hopea and other native species should not only promote biodiversity, but supply Vietnam’s
Vietnamese scientists say native species should not only promote biodiversity, but also supply domestic timber.domestic timber market and $2.8 billion-per-year furniture export industry.
“We have to have a compromise between production and conservation forests,” said Ha Huy Thinh, director of the Research Center for Forestry Improvement at the Forest Science Institute of Vietnam. “Hopea has existed in Vietnam for thousands of years, and it grows in friendship with other species. But in the long term it must provide material for industry.”
There are other complications. Even if native Dipterocarps are valuable in the long term — Hopea odorata logs are worth at least three to four times more than acacia logs — they take at least 30 years to mature, as opposed to five years for acacia. Hopea seedlings require two years in the nursery — about 20 months more than acacia seedlings — and are 5 to 10 times more expensive.
In Vietnam, where 25 million people depend on forest products for subsistence, that higher price makes a difference: Many Vietnamese villagers prefer to plant acacia, which they sell to domestic paper mills.
Vietnam began offering subsidies for native-tree reintroduction in 1998, but they have proven insufficient for poor villagers, said Tran Lam Dong, a Ph.D. student at the University of Tasmania in Australia. Financial support aside, many Vietnamese agricultural extension workers lack proper training on how to reintroduce native trees, said Christopher Beadle of Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO. In the case of Hopea odorata, he said, unless the tree is planted with acacia at a special density ratio — 600 hopea trees and 1,000 acacia trees per hectare — shade from the acacias stunts the hopeas.
Despite these challenges, Vietnamese growers are planting Hopea odorata and other native Dipterocarps on small scales. For example, on government land in Dong Nai Province, foresters from the Vinh Cuu Nature Reserve are intercropping Hopea odorata with coffee bushes. (Vietnam is the world’s second-largest coffee exporter behind Brazil.)
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The native forests of Vinh Cuu were exploited until a 1997 logging ban halted the destruction, said Tran Van Mui of the Vinh Cuu Nature Reserve. He said that the reserve’s effort to spur villages to replant native tree species has faced some resistance. “Sometimes local people say no,” Mui recalled on a recent morning in his office. “They know that if they plant hopea in 2010, they can’t harvest until 2050. And most of them are poor, so planting acacia is easier.”
Mui sat under a portrait of former Vietnamese President Ho Chi Minh. After glancing at topographical maps on his wall, he stood, pushed open his office door, and walked through a courtyard toward the Vinh Cuu reserve’s front gate. The only sound in the dusty parking lot was of birds chirping. A 40-foot Hopea odorata tree was standing tall in fierce sunshine.
POSTED ON 04 Nov 2010 IN Biodiversity Biodiversity Forests Oceans Pollution & Health Asia Asia
ABOUT THE AUTHORMike Ives is a freelance writer based in Hanoi whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, Sierra Magazine, E Magazine, and other publications. In Vietnam he writes for the German Press Agency.
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I very much enjoyed the article "In War-Scarred Landscape , Vietman Replants Its Forests".
Presently I am in China with my wife. We are only a 2 hour drive to Vietman. The subject of Forestry in Vietnam has always interested me.
We cannot dwell on the events of the past, but only look forward to find common grounds for solutions to reforestation. My mind, like so many of us is mixed as to what to do. If we look at the near future, the local people need "money" , so the best for them is to plant the fast growing non-native species. On the other hand, if we look into the distant future, we should focus on biodiversity and need for adequate reforstation of slower growing native species.
The questions we ask today are by no means new. I remember studying this in Forestry Economics some 50 years ago. Look at many of the world's countries that face similar situation.--same ole question.
So, where should we go? Shall we let politics decide, or mix with basic forestry ideals and principles .
Stephen John Hanover, MF '64
Interesting acticle!
When an eco-system has been replaced by another expecially monoculture for a longtime, it is hard to be recovered as original.
Acacia is well-know for its tolerance on harsh environment and improvement of site condition. This should be taken as its advantage to use as pioneer on degraded land. But when the site condition is improved, local species should be consider as later succession.
Hopea odorata is just an example of the native species. There are thousand of high value native species at tropical countries.
Mixed species of Acacia and native species for both short and long-term incomes is an option for the small-holder forest growers.
It is my belief and past experience that by properly feeding the trees and spraying them with environmentally friendly products it will allow the trees to grow and establish. The products that I am suggesting are grown in the region of the acacia and hopea odorata trees.
One method is producing compost and compost tea using local products.
From the article I gather that the roots of Hopea odorata and Coffee bushes do not inhibit eachother. But I suspect that H. odorata may grow best in stands with other native plants, both from the point of root exudates and nodules of nitrogen capturing bacteria, thus providing a source of nitrates for optimal growth.
Therefore would it be possible for villagers to put a third of the available land down to regenereation of native jungle; a third to H. odorata and Coffee; and a third to fast growing Acacia. If the layout of the patches were carefully thought out, then eventually reasonable sized blocks of native jungle might provide a nursery for regeneration of this devastated Ecosystem.
Before C3 trees are planted out the need is for C4 understorey establishment! C3 trees rice cotton and most grains and vegetables consume the soil soil-carbon and elements.
Obtain best advice before you start, develop a long short term plan please. time is enemy
Soil water vegetation atmosphere the only assets of manking.
Robert Vincin
Beijing
Rather than an "either- or" approach (native species versus exotics), I agree with the suggestion that a more integrated approach, along the following lines. Firstly, community plantings, for amenity purposes, could be tried in areas nearer the villages (agroforestry, fuel and other forest products). Secondly, commercial plantations (including acacia and eucalyptus), could be established, on degraded land. Thirdly, silviculture treatments could be used to release advanced growth, of the desired native species, in areas to be returned to their more natural state.
Hello
i am very interested in this subject!!
but, my question may seem a bit different.
i live in Viet Nam for about five months a year (winter), and have travelled a considerably have observed the vast degradation of the countryside and the suburban areas
my thoughts about reforestation focus on small areas that could be used as demonstration and educational plots in relatively urban setting. (every little bit would be a step in the right direction.) for instance, along some of the major waterways in the city, highways are being built, but usually with some sort of green strip separating the roadways and the river. right now, these green strips are being planted with monocultures of showy trees.
could not the government be encouraged to plant local species that have been extirpated from these areas? and at highway interchanges, there is a considerable amount of land that could become micro forests instead of grassy areas with exotic or decorative trees.
i think you understand what my point is, so i will not add more, but i would be interested in hearing from you about this idea if you have an interest or the time.
thanks for your consideration,
Wright Gregson
168/5/5 Lac Long Quan p3 q 11 HCMC Viet Nam
gwrightg@yahoo.com
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