China

Asia's forests are being destroyed at a staggering rate. China, which has become, virtually overnight, the second largest importer of logs in the world, trailing only the United States, has a lot to do with it. (The volume of uncut logs arriving in China has more than tripled since 1998 to over 15 million cubic meters.).

Inland aquaculture has been practiced in Asian countries, namely in Indonesia, China, India and Thailand for hundreds of years. Shrimps were traditionally cultivated in paddy fields or in ponds combined with fishes, without significantly altering the mangrove forest, which for centuries has been used communally by local people providing them a number of products such as commercial fish, shrimp, game, timber, honey, fuel, medicine. Women have played a key role in taking the advantage of mangrove resources. In Papua Island, indigenous knowledge regulates woman’s role in mangrove forest.

The Great Leap Forward in 1958 and the Cultural Revolution had thwarted in China the establishment of high yield timber plantations put forward in the late 1950s by the Chinese Ministry of Forestry. However, since 1980s, along with the implementation of the reform and open-door policy (namely China's entry to the global market arena), the existing imbalance between wood demand and supply was altered. This seems to be not very different from the process undergone by other countries which end up engulfed by the global commerce and its packaging demand.

Nobody knows exactly how many people have been evicted from their homes and land to make way for China's 22,000 large dams. Official Chinese government statistics give a figure of 10 million people, but Dai Qing, the Chinese hydropower critic, estimates that the true figure is somewhere between 40 and 60 million people. Another 280 dams are currently under construction in China, and state policy is to increase the proportion of electricity generated by hydropower plants from 19 per cent to 40 per cent, by 2015.

The growth of the Chinese economy, measured in conventional economy terms, is astonishing: its National Gross Product jumped to U$$ 4 trillion, which represents a 22-fold increase of its value in 1978.

UPM-Kymmene Corporation --one of the world's largest forest products companies and paper producers, with industrial plants in 15 countries-- the APRIL Group (Asia Pacific Resources International Holdings Ltd.) and APRIL's majority shareholder have recently signed an agreement to sell APRIL's 51% interest in the Changshu paper mill to UPM-Kymmene. The value of the transaction is US$ 150 million. As a consequence of the agreement, the Finland-based UPM-Kymmene has now become the sole owner of the Changshu paper mill.

The World Bank's work in China's forest and forest-related sectors is portrayed as highly successful by the report, though including a number of recommendations for future work to address some current constraints.

The World Bank is apparently willing to play a major role in the promotion of tree plantations. This can mean good or bad news, depending on the type of plantations it is willing to promote. The country studies provide useful -though incomplete- information on the issue, which we believe the Bank should use as a starting point for its own research on the positive and negative impacts of different types of plantations. It appears clearly that large-scale monoculture tree plantations should not be promoted, given their negative environmental impacts and their few positive social effects.

In the imperial times Japan invaded China to expand its power in the Far East. Nowadays, when war time in that region is over, a new kind of invasion is up to affect the Chinese territory: that of tree plantations associated to the Clean Development Mechanisms (CDM) under the Kyoto Protocol.

While Japanese investors are ocupying the Chinese territory with tree plantations, China is doing business in the paper sector abroad. Kunming Electro-Chemical Plant (KECP), with headquarters in the Chinese province of Yunnan, signed a contract last December with the Myanmar Ministry of Industry to renovate the caustic soda and chlorine plant of the Sittoung Paper Mill No.1 in Mon state. The factory was built in 1992 and production began in 1994.

APRIL (Asia Pacific Resources International Holding Ltd.) –partner of the Finnish UPM-Kymmene- is known for its permanent violations to human rights and depredatory environmental practices in Indonesia. Lately APRIL has been the cause of local conflicts between villagers and workers in Indonesia (see WRM Bulletin 17, November 1998).