China farming the world to feed its economy

Another Chinese enterprise in Kratie province circumvented the size restriction by registering as three separate companies, Global Witness says.

In Beijing, the Commerce Ministry declined to answer written questions about China’s global reach in agriculture or operations of Chinese enterprises abroad except in Laos, where it said companies had a “very strong awareness for environmental protection.” Local residents welcome the new developments because incomes have increased by as much as five times, a ministry statement said.

However, the central government in Laos last May ordered a moratorium on concessions over 247 acres, in part because it had become clear many were covers for logging.

Entire hills in the north have been scalped of green cover, and rubber trees penetrate into the tangled natural forests. Also being cleared are secondary forests, sources of medicinal herbs and edible plants that tribal people have depended on for generations.

The government edict against concessions appears to have been ignored in the north, where local officials often a make the rules in an environment of corruption, ill-defined land laws, vague agreements and conflicting agencies.

“The Chinese companies do everything in their power to take advantage but they are also taken advantage of. The system is corrupt and there are loopholes and sometimes it works in their favor and sometimes against them,” says Weiyi Shi, an American economist who recently completed a study on the rubber industry.

The study found that when the China-Lao Ruifeng Rubber Company moved in, the frontier village of Changee lost most of its rice fields and grazing land and its burial grounds were desecrated. The pleas of villagers got no result and some protesters were reportedly held at gunpoint, with the Chinese using coercion through local authorities.

A company executive, Zheng Fengqi, contacted in China, denied there were any protests on the concession granted by the military.

“The local people also liked the project because they could earn more money and lead a life of better quality,” he says.

Many independent farmers do indeed embrace the Chinese with enthusiasm, hoping to replicate an earlier rubber bonanza in China’s neighboring Yunnan province. Some have personal contacts, even relatives, living in China and set up informal business arrangements with them.

Some villagers even torch their surrounding forests, hoping the Chinese will come in and offer them rubber trees.

“They see what is in China, where people have gone from wooden houses to concrete, walking or bikes to motorbikes and cars, buffaloes to hand tractors and kerosene to electricity,” says Michael Dwyer, a natural resources researcher from the University of California, Berkeley. “They want the same.”

Farmers can hope to take home up to $1,200 from an acre of rubber — roughly seven times more than from growing rice. But it will be another six to seven years before latex begins to ooze from most trees in the north.

“If the price is high we will prosper,” says Chan Phoung, one of the villagers at Chaleunsouk, inhabited by the Khmu ethnic minority. “If it’s low we don’t know what we will do.”

A friend adds: “It’s like raising a pig for profit — it may die before you can sell it at the market.”

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