VietNamNet Bridge – Taiwanese group InnovGreen told VietNamNet that it is willing to hand over the forest land  in areas that are sensitive in terms of security and defense and move to other locations to continue its forest planting projects in Vietnam.

People worried about forest plantations scheme run by foreigners

In late 2010, VietNamNet published a series of reportages about forest-related projects of foreign investors in Vietnam, including the InnovGreen project. At that time, some agencies of the government and National Assembly made public the reports about forest leasing in Vietnam as local governments were granted the power to license forest-related projects.

InnovGreen has recently sent an open letter to the government and the local media expressing its willingness to exchange plots of land at “sensitive” locations to “neutral” ones to continue its projects.

VietNamNet talked with InnovGreen General Director Dean Wu about this.

Could you tell us about InnovGreen and its goal in Vietnam?

InnovGreen is registered in Hong Kong by a Taiwanese investor Steve Chang, a famous IT businessman in Taiwan and Asia, with the aim to invest in forest planting and wood processing in Vietnam. It operates as a social enterprise.

It is registered in Hong Kong because Hong Kong is an economic and financial center of Asia. Investors from Hong Kong are protected by investment agreements with the Vietnamese Government, which we would not enjoy if we had registered our company in Taiwan.

As a social enterprise and in order to do business successfully, we follow sustainable business principles, with the strong belief of benefiting not only ourselves, our employees in Vietnam but also the Vietnamese government, local people and the society because our projects will bring about environmental benefits.

It is said that InnovGreen is licensed to lease watershed forest and border forest land, which are important for Vietnam’s security and defense. How do you explain this?

Perhaps there were some misunderstandings about our projects. First of all, I would like to say that we don’t lease the forest but the land for planting production forest.

When we lease the land, we always wish it to be located in the areas with good infrastructure to facilitate the transportation of materials, processing and export activities.

We don’t want the land in remote and isolated areas, where there are no roads and difficult geological conditions, which some say are “sensitive” in terms of security and defense. For InnovGreen, that is would not be an attractive area because we would have to invest in building roads, have difficulties recruiting workers and planting and then growing the forest.

However, businesses can’t have all they wish for and so we had to invest more than usual to plant the forest at the committed pace.

There appeared some regrettable misunderstandings about the investment goals and operations of InnovGreen so we sent an open letter to the government, the people and the media to express our willingness to hand over the land that is considered “sensitive” if the state gives us equivalent areas of land at other locations, with similar lease period and compensate us for the expenditures on the surveys, road building, planting and growing of the forest.

Why did InnovGreen ask to exchange the land while the authorities hadn’t revoked the previous land?

We didn’t ask to exchange the land but we expressed our willingness to do so if the Vietnamese government needed the previous land. For the past one year, our projects in Vietnam have been stagnating, causing heavy losses to our group. InnovGreen wishes to clarify the situation to continue our investment or to make other decisions about our operations.

Moreover, most of the land that we leased is not good and which nobody wanted to lease. if we can exchange it for the land in another area, it can only be for the better.

As InnovGreen leases many plots of land at sensitive locations in some border provinces in Vietnam, some suspect that InnovGreen has other purposes. What can you say about this?

Our projects in Vietnam aim to plant forests to serve the local timber processing industry and for export, which benefits the local people, helps reduce the rate of deforestation and create a sustainable social enterprise.

We choose forest planting and forestry development to respond to the Vietnamese government’s call for investment in agriculture and rural development. As far as I know, InnovGreen is the largest investor in Vietnam in forest planting, the field where the Vietnamese government encourages investments.

All members of the Management Board of InnovGreen are Taiwanese Americans who set up their businesses in the US. Especially, Mr. Steve Chang, Chairman of InnovGreen and Chairman cum founder of Trend Micro, the world leading provider of network security services, is called the “Bill Gates of Asia”. In 2001, he was listed by the ZDNet Asia magazine among 25 people who make the biggest/ positive change . BusinessWeek presented him with the Asian Star title twice. In 2004, he earned the title “The Reformer of the Year” for Asian economic leaders. In 2009, CNBC channel honored Steve Change with the Lifetime Award.

As a world famous businessman, Mr. Steve Change has no reason to harm his personal image, the image of Trend Micro, of other companies that he invests in or to harm his colleagues in Vietnam and the image of Taiwan and Taiwanese people. Given all this, Steve Chang and InnovGreen have no reason to become paid employees for money or for any political purpose to any government or any country to harm your country.

In the current situation, InnovGreen only wants to cooperate with local people to plant production forest. The biggest problem for us at present is if local people break their contracts with us or illegally cut down our trees, etc. However, we are willing to implement our projects on large scale if the government guarantees our interests in case such risks happen.

According to reports of the government and the National Assembly, InnovGreen has been granted investment certificates for hundreds of thousands of hectares. How much land have your company leased in Vietnam and how large is the area of forest that your firm has planted so far?

By December 2010, InnovGreen received the land use right certificates for 8,672 hectares of forest land. We have planted 4,522 hectares of forest. It shows that we have immediately planted forest in the areas wewere allocated, following our commitments.

Your company has been in Vietnam for five years. What do you think about the investment environment in Vietnam?

InnovGreen has been in Vietnam for nearly six years. Though the Vietnamese government gives investment incentives for forest planting projects and tries to create a favorable investment climate for foreign investors, foreign investors still face a lot of difficulties because of the cumbersome and inconsistent procedures. Many good policies are not seriously carried out.

If these matters are solved, Vietnam can attract more investment capital in forestry to raise forest coverage and curb deforestation and to create more jobs for farmers in the mountainous regions.

What is InnovGreen’s plan in Vietnam in the near future?

We see great potentials in Vietnam to develop the forestry sector because Vietnam has large areas of bare hills and unused land where forests can be developped to serve the rising demand for timber in the world market.

We still want to cooperate with Vietnam and develop our forest planting projects here for many years. InnovGreen is still committed to invest in the forest planting projects in Vietnam and we hope its government will continue to support our projects.

Mai Thao