VietNamNet Bridge – Investors always reason the local economic development when registering rubber growing projects. However, they just try to make profit for themselves by exploiting rich forests and selling precious wood.

Local authorities tend to turn the poor forests into the areas for local economic development which helps improve the living standards and create more jobs to local people.

However, in fact, the two purposes cannot be obtained, while the deforestation has occurred in the way not wanted by the policy makers.

Local newspapers have reported that hundreds of thousands of hectares of forests in the Central Highlands have been destroyed for wood exploitation, though on papers, this aims to clear land for the rubber growing.

In Loc Bao, Loc Bac and Bao Lam districts of Lam Dong province alone, there are 16-17 rubber companies, which come from other localities to grow rubber. The companies reportedly are from HCM City, Binh Duong and Binh Phuoc provinces.

In fact, experts still keep arguing about the policy on shifting poor natural forests into cultivation land areas. Economists believe that poor and exhausted forests cannot serve as the preventive forests anymore; therefore, it’d be better to destroy them.

However, Pham Quang Tu, Deputy Head of CODE, a consultancy institute for development, does not think this way. Vietnam is a tropical country; therefore, it needs to preserve natural forests. During the development, the deforestation may lead to the forest exhaustion. However, by the nature, tropical forests have the high capability of recovering.

Meanwhile, the efficiency of the rubber growing projects much depends on the quality and the world’s rubber price. Ethnic minority people still live in difficulties and they have no jobs.

Tu has warned that once local people rush to grow rubber, this may lead to the oversupply. It usually happens in Vietnam that farmers rush to grow the plants which can bring high economic value, and they suffer heavily when the prices of the products fall in the world market.

Tu affirmed that the majority of the forests which have been destroyed for growing rubber are not the poor forests as reported. In many areas, the forests contain high quality wood and the trees with high-diameter tree trunks.

In an interview given to Dan Viet newspaper, Tu said the forests are completely recoverable and that they still can work as the preventive forests, because they are the watershed forests.

Local newspapers have quoted environmentalists as saying that one day in the near future, possibly 10 or 20 more years, Vietnam would have no more primitive forests and rich forests. Global Witness has also pointed out that enterprises now tend to destroy forests under the mask of the development.

Tu also thinks that it is highly possible that Vietnam one day may lose the natural forests, though he cannot say when this would happen.

Tu has called on to protect natural forests at any costs, or Vietnam would have no more hectares of natural forests one day. He has also warned that Vietnam will have to pay a heavy price in the future, if it still loosens the management over the natural forests which protect Vietnamese people.

Dan Viet