Barun Roy: Vietnam's other war

ASIA FILE

At last, the physical scars of Vietnam have begun to heal. The process hasn't been easy and the odds have been formidable "" 30 devastating years of war (first against the French and then the Americans), the wilful and wanton destruction of the environment by enemy forces, encroachments from a large and poor rural population, and, more recently, the pressures exerted by an economy wanting to develop fast. But the sheer determination of the government to rise from the ashes has helped turn the tide and Vietnam is well on its way to winning an ecological battle that many had given up as lost.

Back in 1945, before the war of resistance against the French, 43 per cent of the country had a forest cover. In the following decades, the cover steadily receded till it reached 27.7 per cent by 1990. US military actions alone wiped out an estimated 4.9 million hectares of the forest cover. Some 13 million tonnes of bombs were dropped on the tiny, shrimp-shaped country and 72 million litres of defoliants were sprayed to denude its forests. The toxic effects of this senseless depredation made any regeneration impossible for years and increased chances of forest fires.

Through a series of legislations and plans that include massive reforestation, rehabilitation of degraded forest lands, stricter land-use allocations, a ban on the export of logs and lumber, and a greater involvement of the people in forest management as a means of reducing their poverty, Vietnam has reached a stage where there is now a net gain of some 241,000 hectares of forests annually. At this rate of expansion, it is hoped, the forest cover, which reached 12.93 million hectares, or 39.7 per cent of the total land area, by the end of 2005, would, in another four years, go back to where it was in 1945.

Buttressing this effort is what is known as the "Five-Million-Hectare Reforestation Programme", an initiative covering the period from 1998 to 2010 and aiming not only to reforest the country but also to address issues of rural poverty. The objectives are to speed up forest plantation, re-green barren land, protect existing and new forests, and strengthen biodiversity. It may be that the new forests are low grade, consisting of fast-growing, non-native varieties, mainly acacia, but the goal here is to build up a canopy as quickly as possible and create the proper environment for quality native varieties to survive well and eventually take over.

Besides its desperate effort to re-green itself, Vietnam has done something else that ensures its environmental future. It has established a network of 27 national parks, 60 nature reserves, and a number of biosphere reserves under Unesco's protection, covering no less than 7.6 per cent of the country's territory. To ensure that these parks are not degraded in any way, buffer zones have been created and allocated to people living on parkland to grow their own plantation timber for sale to state-owned forestry enterprises and paper mills or pursue other forest-related activities.

A new national forestry strategy is being prepared to cope with future challenges as Vietnam's forestry sector, along with other segments of the economy, becomes more integrated with the global economy following its likely entry this year into the World Trade Organisation. However, the task is not going to be easy.

This is because Vietnam's strong and restructured agricultural sector has placed its own demands on forest lands, as has aquaculture, an important contributor to the buoyancy of its recent economic growth (8.4 per cent in 2005). The country's export of agricultural products rose 29 per cent from 2004 to $5.8 billion last year. Vietnamese rice, pepper, cashew nuts, coffee, peanuts, rubber, dairy products, fruit and vegetables are now sold in some 100 countries worldwide and continue to increase market share. The area under aquaculture now occupies over 900,000 hectares, an expansion of 41 per cent over the past five years. Shrimp breeding alone, mostly for export, now accounts for 66.8 per cent of the total area under aquaculture, against 47.7 per cent in 2001. A total of $2.6 billion worth of aquaculture products were sold abroad last year, representing 4 per cent of the country's GDP.

At the same time, exports of Vietnamese wood products have tripled since the mid-1990s and are estimated to have reached $1.6 billion in 2005. The manufacture of wooden furniture is now one of the fastest growing industries in the country, with the US beginning to take an extra interest in importing from Vietnam and more than 1,200 companies are currently involved in timber processing.

All these diverse activities will determine how Vietnam grows and preserves its forests in the future and reconciling them under a broad national policy would require a more intensive programme of regeneration and maintenance. The good thing about Vietnam is that the government knows what it has to do.