One Tree at a Time
By Karen J. Coates
By cutting and selling old-growth wood for a fraction of its worth, Vietnam's Hmong may endanger their long-term survival
TWO SMALL, BRAWNY MEN slosh through an icy stream, their cheap plastic sandals slapping slick rocks. They never break their stride, hurdling pools between boulders. On their shoulders, they tote a 100-pound slab of wood.
This is how old-growth trees in Vietnam's highest, northernmost mountains are harvested: one by one, illegally, cut and lugged entirely by hand. This is also how the Hmong, among the area's poorest ethnic minorities, struggle to support themselves and their families.
As a writer based in Oregon--where battles over the fate of old-growth forests have raged for many years--I've come with photojournalist Jerry Redfern to see these mountainous forests, and to learn how trees here are cut, trimmed and hauled away. What we find over the course of our four-day trek is a tragic portrait of extreme poverty, environmental degradation and a struggle for human survival. By cutting and selling ancient trees for a pittance today, the Hmong may be staying alive, but in the process they are endangering their region's long-term environmental and economic well-being as forests rapidly disappear.
We begin our journey in Sapa, an old French hill town that looms over a wide valley of terraces and thatch huts. Across the gap are the stunning peaks of Hoang Lien Son Nature Reserve and Fansipan, Vietnam's highest mountain.
To get to the forest, we hire one of Sapa's most experienced guides, a Vietnamese man named Long (a pseudonym we choose to protect his identity). He's 22, wears $5 blue canvas shoes and a silk shirt that wets and dries with his skin. He carries a daypack filled with Camels, cabbage, soup stock, onions, spinach, potatoes, two cooking pots, three bowls and not a single change of clothes.
The trail goes up and down--no switchbacks, just straight up and down. Long says switchbacks would only add distance. For four days, we will see no level ground except a small forested hilltop and a parched valley floor.
On our first day, we pass two Hmong men coming down from the forest carrying a foot-wide, six-foot-long log. Their teenage sons, who camp out in the high-mountain forests at night, are the ones who actually cut the trees, which are hauled to market by the adults. The two men break for lunch, wetting cold rice--all they've carried on the journey--in a stream. They tell Long that their log will sell for about $100 in Sapa and that they'll spend the money on food. With many of their families caring for eight to ten children, they say the money helps.
Down the path, more loggers rest. One demands money in return for photos we want to shoot. Jerry pulls a 200-dong note--worth less than $0.02--from one pocket and lint from the other. They laugh. Next, we try to lift their beam, which is resting on rocks. The men hoot as we buckle under its weight. Farther along the trail we tread over bomb scars in rock--reminders of a 1979 Chinese invasion.
Soon we reach a village on the flat valley bottom. Flea-bitten children approach us, sniffing, coughing and sneezing. Their skin is gray and coated in dried mud. Beyond the village is a slash zone of denuded rust-colored hills and smoldering fires. Men and women work the fields. Hoe against rock forms a steady chip-chip rhythm. We camp here, near a wooden hut, in ashes, grass, dead shrubs and cow dung.
Poverty amid natural wealth
According to a December 2000 United Nations Development Program report, 75 percent of Vietnam's 53 minority groups live below the poverty line. The Hmong, in particular, suffer heavily. Driven out of China in the early 1800s, the Hmong settled near Sapa and began practicing slash-and-burn, or swidden, agriculture complemented by forest exploitation.
Because many Hmong sided against Vietnamese victors in the war against the French, animosity toward the group remains. "There's been a lot of Hmong bashing in the region's press lately," says Deanna Donovan, a scholar at the East-West Center in Hawaii. The Hmong often pay more for food in the market, and health care and social services lie beyond their grasp.
At the same time, demographic changes are aggravating the group's plight. Since the French defeat in 1954, Vietnam's population has tripled to more than 76 million, and it is expected to reach 100 million by 2024. In addition, lowlanders have crowded into highlands, and swidden fields are no longer left fallow long enough to regenerate. Both food and cropland are scarce in this isolated mountain region.
Though the government has pumped hundreds of billions of dong into uplands development--and aid workers strive to boost literacy, vocational skills and agricultural production--such efforts have proved inadequate. Annual income in the mountains is often less than $100, and 83 percent of adult Hmong males and 97 percent of females are illiterate, more than any other ethnic minority in the country.
Meanwhile, the trees beckon. Cutting down trees is illegal here, but people tell us that each slab can fetch $20 to $100. The wood fuels village life. It supports marriage and gambling; it buys grain, meat and even whiskey. And for better and worse, it alters Hmong culture just as it transforms the landscape.
Young loggers
The next morning, as we pack to leave our campsite, we see loggers heading up to the forest. They've hiked, since dawn, the entire distance we covered the day before. Today's trek begins with thick fog and a river we'll have to crisscross several times by foot. Two men with logs come sloshing over the wet rocks with ease, but it takes us--after switching from hiking boots to Tevas--a long time to make it across. On the other side of the river, we trudge over dung-fertilized paddies. Later we enter a red, muddy gulch weaving through moss and trees--a young forest.
We camp that night in a cloud. Dampness settles on our skin. The moisture hangs in the air--so dense we can see only 40 yards. The forest sings: It croaks, howls and sighs. Frogs emit deep-throated gurgles, birds cackle, crickets chirp, a primate whoops. And something metal clinks--the sound of loggers.
Soon after we leave the next morning, the forest changes abruptly, becoming taller, deeper, thicker. Trees tower like redwoods, higher than we can see. Chisel marks mar bark. Tiny paths head into dense, thorny shrubs. "Those are loggers' trails," Long says.
We hear tap, tap. "Shh. When they hear you, they will run away," Long warns, then scampers ahead, alone, into the underbrush. Later we find him chatting with two teenagers. One carries a handmade axe. They say little, and Long tells us not to talk. "They think maybe we are from the government . . . they think we are talking about them." We ask him to explain that we come from a place where logging is very different; people would want to know how they work here. He shushes us again. He says nothing to the young men, but plays with their axe, flings it against a log and tries to build rapport.
Two more teens join the scene, and the boys fasten together a two-person saw. It breaks under tension, sending a piece of the handle flying into Long's head. They all laugh; the air lightens. Then we follow them to a makeshift mill in a clearing.
Long whittles a wooden gun while the teenagers work. First they cut a little well into bark and fill it with water carried in hollow bamboo. Next they add a dollop of acid from a crushed Chinese D-cell battery, roll hemp string into it, and mark straight, black lines on the tree where they will cut it. Then they hoist the unfinished log onto cross trunks. The boys, ages 15 and 17, sit opposite each other, saw slicing back and forth. It takes two minutes to cut two inches. Sawdust scatters onto their legs and feet. They leave behind mounds of scrap. Only perfect, knot-free rectangles will sell.
Tree by tree
Though estimates vary widely, most studies conclude that up to 50 percent of Vietnam's forests have been lost over the past half-century. But according to A. Terry Rambo, a human ecologist at Kyoto University's Center for Southeast Asian Studies, "the situation around Sapa is not at all typical of what is happening elsewhere in the country." Instead, he says the vast majority of deforestation can be attributed to "lowlanders and lowland-based interests"--including immigrants, state farms and businesses--rather than to ethnic minorities from the highlands. Rambo, who has studied upland development in Vietnam since 1989, says that large-scale land clearing for coffee and other cash crops is by far the most important cause of deforestation nationwide.
Still, at the local level, small-scale logging takes a toll. Loggers such as the Hmong, who work either alone or in family groups, may not realize that their neighbors on the other side of the mountain are doing the same thing they are. "Sooner or later," says Donovan, "they're going to meet at the top of the hill. And they'll all be there." But the trees won't.
In Sapa, we asked a Vietnamese trek-king guide named Hong about forest loss in the region. "It's going so quickly," she tells us. "Once I took tourists into the forest on the other side of the hill, and they asked me [the same question]. I said I think maybe the forest will be gone in ten years. Then the next year I go back, and it's gone already."
All this is bad news for wildlife. According to Joe Walston, a biologist in Cambodia for the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society, northern Vietnam is "one of the most fascinating biogeographical regions in the world," linking the northern Annamite, the eastern Himalaya and the southern Palearctic regions. This meeting ground "was home to some of the most fascinating, unique and diverse groups of species," including tigers, leopards, gaurs and elephants. But today, Vietnam's Red Data Book, published by the Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment, lists more than 80 endangered, threatened or rare species in Lao Cai, the province Sapa is in, and Lai Chau, the next province west.
Logging delivers a double whammy, says Walston: "Logging is not just damaging because of the loss of trees. It is damaging because of the access it provides hunters." And unregulated hunting is big business around Sapa. According to a 1998 East-West Center report, Vietnam loses wildlife to an "insatiable" Chinese appetite for exotic animal parts for food and medical preparations. The report adds that "effective government control of this trade is virtually impossible."
Most of the wood cut in Sapa also heads to China, where it's used for construction and to make furniture. Yet the Hmong are not paid what their goods are worth. "As it is, the only ones who have profited from the loss of Vietnam's northern forests are the Chinese and a few Vietnamese government officials," says Walston. Robin Rose, a forestry professor and Asia expert at Oregon State University, agrees. "The greatest travesty," he says, "is how much [the Hmong] get cheated."
Few winners, many losers
We watch the teenagers work some more, then start our long trek back to Sapa. The return trip is grueling. We dive, tumble and slide on our rumps down a mud shoot. Bamboo moans as we grip its shiny stems. When we reach an overlook, we see the valley, the road to Sapa, the thatched huts and whittled landscape. We stagger exhausted through the village, with its crying babies, snarling dogs and barefoot toddlers in homes with dirt floors.
When Rose sees our photographs months later in his university office, he shakes his head in dismay. "This is so ungodly wasteful," he says. But Rose cannot begrudge the poor. "There's no other source of income," he says. "The sad part is that everyone loses."
Oregon-based free-lance writer Karen J. Coates and photojournalist Jerry Redfern have worked and traveled extensively in Southeast Asia. They are currently working on a book about Cambodia.
Copyright 2001 National Wildlife Federation. All rights reserved. The above article may not be republished or redistributed, in whole or in part, without prior written consent of National Wildlife Federation.