18 aslife

HCMC

Vietnam is one of the most biodiverse countries on the planet,but it has also suffered from decades of deforestation andhabitat loss and remains a hot spot for wildlife trade. Today,conservationists face an uphill battle to save Vietnam’sbeleaguered wildlife.

By Tom DiChristopher.

Wildlife in

t is mid-aternoon on a warm, sunnyday in Lam Dong Province, and as I steermy motorbike around a bend on Highway20 just past Madagui town, the our hoursI’ve spent on the road nally pay o. Thelanes narrow and plunge suddenly intoa mountain corridor draped with verdant jungle fora. I let up on the accelerator andtake in the veil o oliage that cascadesdown the mountainsides. Two hours later and a ew kilometresdown the road, the picture is very dierent.I have joined Francois Bouvery, who istaking me to see a sustainable agro-orestryproject in the surrounding mountains thathis company, Touton SA-France, buyscocoa rom. Shortly ater pulling o thehighway, we have to yield the road to amassive truck hauling thick trunks o lumber.Just a ew hundred metres ahead, Bouveryasks me to pull over so he can take a photoo a mountainside across the valley, where alarge swath o land is barren and burnt.We spend the remainder o the aternoontouring two pilot sites with a pair o Ma mi-nority men rom a nearby village who over-see the project, a joint venture o Touton,Winrock, the World Fund or Nature (WWF)and local authorities. Bouvery assesses thesize and health o the cocoa plants thatgrow beneath the preserved orest canopy,asking about a ew sickly looking trees andreminding them that the price o cocoaremains high on the commodities market.Every now and then Bouvery gazes outat the surrounding landscape, where orestcover has been converted to plantations.“Coee, cashew, paper, rubber, tea—theseare the main killers o orest,” Bouvery toldme earlier in the day. At one point, he stopsme and points at the tangle o jungle brusharound our ankles; hundreds o insects hopat our eet in a circus o activity. He motionsor me to listen to the sound o bird calls inthe canopy.“You can see there are still a lot o birds,a lot o lie,” says Bouvery. Then, he pointsthrough a break in the tree line, at yetanother swath o burnt earth that mars themountainside on the horizon. “You go overthere … nothing.”

aslife

HCMC

There are possibly as few as 350Indochinese tigers remaining in thesub-region, and their habitat has beenreduced by more than 45 percent overthe course of the last decade

20 aslife

HCMC

Setting the Stage

In the last 60 years, Vietnam’s landscape haschanged dramatically. Rampant habitat losshas ragmented populations o the country’smore than 1,500 species o amphibians,birds, mammals and reptiles and made themextraordinarily susceptible to today’s largestthreat: the wildlie trade.Population pressure is certainly one parto the problem. According to the PopulationReerence Bureau, Vietnam’s populationgrew rom about 27 million people in 1950to more than 85 million in mid-2007, withpopulation density increasing rom 83 peopleper square kilometre to 257. By comparison,population density in mid-2007 was 128people per square kilometre in Thailand,79 in Cambodia, 74 in Myanmar and 25 inLaos. This rapid population growth has paral-leled another trend: the transition romcommunity-based management o orests,oten by minority groups like the Ma, to top-down governance. Beginning in the 1950s,this lead to widespread conversion o landor agricultural expansion and logging inboth ertile lowlands and the more rugged,orested highlands.In a 2001 review on the state o the envi-ronment, the Vietnam Environment Adminis-tration (VEA) pointed particularly to “selectivecutting or timber exploitation and clear cut-ting or reclaiming land or agriculture” rom1954 to 1986 by state agriculture agencies,which it says conducted little planning orsurveying. Within that period, Vietnam alsolost more than 2 million hectares o land tothe American War.By 1991, there were 412 state orestenterprises logging the country’s orests.Logging rates peaked at 1.2 million cubicmetres o timber in 1992, the same yearthe government made a sharp about ace,reducing quotas by 88 percent beore ban-ning the trade in timber outright in 1993. The legacies o the pre-90s era, says the VEA assessment, are “the large barren landareas throughout the country, soil erosionand landslides, drying up o water resourcesand foods.” Vietnam’s fora has not been the onlyinheritor o this legacy. In 1998, the ForestProtection Department reported that 200species o bird and 120 other animals hadbeen wiped out over the last our decades. Today, there are about 100 more speciesthreatened with extinction (see “Save OurSpecies,” page 24), and unortunately, thereare indicators that more species will be lost.

Tiger, Tiger Burning Out

The day ater touring the Madagui agro-or-estry site, I drive south to Cat Tien NationalPark, back through Tan Phu. Tet is still twoweeks away, but already the world’s largesteline is being reproduced in anticipation o the Year o the Tiger—on product packag-ing, municipal banners, Mobione cards. Itseems everywhere you look are the iconicblack and orange stripes.Everywhere, that is, but where it mattersmost: in the wild.Earlier this year, the WWF released

Tigerson the Brink

, a special report that issues astern warning backed by dire statistics. Ac-cording to the report, there are possibly asew as 350 Indochinese tigers remaining inthe sub-region (down rom 1,227 to 1,778 in1998) and their habitat has been reduced bymore than 45 percent over the course o thelast decade.Long ago orced out o prime huntinggrounds in lowland food plains by humandevelopment, the Indochinese tiger is now