VietNamNet Bridge – The Dau Tieng protective forest in Tan Chau district of Tay Ninh province has been encroached on by local people, who need land for cultivation.

More and more parts of the Dau Tieng protective forest have been cleared for cultivation land. More and more cassava fields have arisen in the middle of the forest.

When approaching the core zone, one can hear the noise from tractors working on fields. And if going more deeply into the forest, one can see the large green cassava fields, the cuts made by plough, and some sentry boxes where people stay at night.

Forest rangers have been told to protect the forests and prevent illegal logging. However, the forest still has been destroyed this or another way. While the forest area are getting narrower, cassava fields are getting larger like the “oil slick.”

There are many ways to encroach on the forest area. People whittled the bark off to make the trees die gradually. When the trees wither, they chop the trees down and grow cassava.

In the small section No. 43 near the core zone of the forest, reporters saw a lot of chopped trees lying on the ground. The fields’ owners there might not have enough time to take the trees away. Some other trees were seen withering, which would be eliminated one day. These included the trees were big with the diameter of 0.5 meter.

The same things were seen in the other small sections No. 44, 47, 49, 48, 37, 522. On some areas, the trees had been just taken away. On the others, young cassava trees had arisen.

It was quite strange that the reporters could not meet anyone in the forest. They could only see the new cuts by plough and newly developed cassava and rice fields.

According to Phung Van Met, a forest ranger, said local people go to the forest at night to take care for their fields. It is very difficult to discover them, because the people have their “spies,” who know the working schedules of the forest rangers’ units and cooperate with each other to cheat forest rangers.

Met said that in many cases, forest rangers became the victims of the revenge. The vehicles or assets of forest rangers got fire or damaged once they caught the people who destroyed trees.

According to Nguyen Van Liem, Head of the Con Tran Hamlet in Tan Hoa commune, 90 percent of the 134 households here have been cultivating illegally in the protective forest and they continue encroaching on the forest land.

However, Liem admitted that it is still unclear how to deal with the households. If the local people cannot cultivate in the forest, they would have nothing to do to earn their living.

Meanwhile, some cassava and rice fields have been existing for more than 20 years, before the protective forest was set up in 1986.

In the Dau Tieng protective forest, besides the cassava and rice fields, there are also many “ownerless” rubber hectares. The rubber trees, together with cassava and rice fields, still have been existing for the last many years.

Thanh Mai