Forestry, Flooding and Farming

Background

Relatively little of China is now wooded, partly because conditions in the western provinces are too cold and arid for forests to grow, and partly because throughout the country’s long history there has been large-scale felling of trees in the eastern half of the country to meet an almost insatiable demand for forest products as food, fuel and construction materials. Even today, the construction industry uses bamboo almost exclusively as a scaffolding and building material; and the amount of building work that has gone on in China in recent years has placed a severe burden on the remaining forests. The main areas with extensive forests are in the northeast (where stretches of the Da Xing’an and Changbai mountain ranges are covered with conifers, larch and birch) and in central and southeastern China (where the subtropical climate encourages growth of both deciduous and evergreen trees, eucalyptus and tropical hardwoods).

Until recently there has been little tradition of replacing forests felled for their timber. In a country where the main building material for centuries has been wood, where paper was invented early and widely used, and where vast areas have been cleared for settlement, industrial development or agriculture, the loss of forest cover has been extensive and serious. By 1948, only 8% of the country was wooded, and shortages were becoming a problem. Since then, there has been a genuine effort at reforestation, with about 1 million hectares of new or regenerated forest being added each year. The aim is that 20% of the country should be forested. The present total is around 12%.

Trees are important not only for the natural resources they produce, but because they play a major role in land management. Bare land is subject to erosion by wind and rain, the effects of which can be reduced by careful planting. Tree cover, once established, reduces the force of the wind, slows the fall of raindrops through the canopy, and improves the ground absorption of water. This prevents surface run-off of rainwater carrying valuable topsoil with it. Areas which have been deforested very quickly become barren as the soil and its nutrients are leached away by run-off. Managed forests, where planting and felling are controlled, allow foresters to control water flow over a wide area: increasing planting can reduce the level of the water table and control flooding, while increasing felling can improve the water supply to more arid areas downstream, allowing irrigation and better crop production. Indiscriminate felling, which has been common in China for many years, can cause extensive damage over the entire watershed of a river, allowing eroded topsoil to be swept downstream as silt, wrecking irrigation schemes and causing flooding.

Following disastrous floods in the Yangtze basin in 1998, the central government declared an immediate suspension of further felling and began a huge replanting programme. While this brought a much-needed halt to deforestation, it caused serious problems for communities whose livelihood depended on the forest. Since the 1950s, land where trees had been felled for fuel or construction had gradually been reclaimed for agriculture, producing grain as both a subsistence and a cash crop. The replanting scheme reclaimed much of this land, depriving local peasant farmers of their fields and their crops. Over 120,000 jobs have been lost as a result.

This belated attempt to manage China’s forests more effectively has caused conflict between two groups with different interests: peasant farmers in upland areas resent the loss of their land and livelihood to reforestation, which they see as benefiting only city dwellers downstream, who have been under constant threat of flooding caused by deforestation. Confiscation of land for tree planting has generated uncertainty and lack of confidence amongst the upland communities, who are now reluctant to invest in the management of their land in case more of it is taken away from them to plant what they see as unproductive trees. Until the balance is restored between the legitimate needs and interests of both communities, the forestry regeneration programme will continue to cause friction. There is no single straightforward solution to the problems discussed in the programme. Different types of tree are appropriate to different types of landcape and agriculture: pine forests suit the higher areas; apples can be planted in the protected dips in between; and chestnuts and other fruit can be grown on the lower slopes. (While the chestnut orchards are privately owned, the small areas devoted to apple orchards are collectively owned.) The role of the forestry official interviewed in the programme is to supervise what goes on, and to monitor how decisions tie in with regional and national policies.