China's thirst for rubber is destroying the environment -- and livelihoods -- in Southeast Asia.
Brendan Borrell, Scientific American 21 May 09;
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
Yahoo News 21 May 09;
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."
