- In 2012, when China’s first privately owned nature reserve was established, local villagers lost their forest-dependent livelihoods.
- Laohegou Nature Reserve has taken steps to help them find new ways to earn a living, hiring some and establishing a program to buy organic food from others.
- However, it hasn’t been enough to support them and today the reserve must take bold steps to help them earn a sustainable living and to secure its own long-term financial footing.
- Other private reserves set up since Laohegou may face similar challenges.
| Other stories in Mongabay’s series on changing forest practices in China: China’s Wanglang panda reserve, once an ecotourism model, faces new threatsChinese villagers turn from logging to forest patrols, bees, and fish Making a living inside a reserve: an interview with village head Zou Huagang PHOTOS: On a Chinese mountain, an aging anti-poaching hero ponders the future |
There is complete serenity inside the Laohegou Nature Reserve. Sitting on a stone beside the clear Laohe River, a visitor hears nothing but the chirping of birds and the gushing of water. Mongabay spotted none of the reserve’s abundant wild mammals during a two-hour trek through its forested valley, but there was plenty of evidence, including dry Panda poop in a bamboo grove and soil freshly turned by a boar (Sus scrofa) or hog-badger (Arctonyx collaris) along the roadside. A successful model of forest protection, Laohegou is nearly unique among China’s nature reserves as the country’s first land trust reserve.
China’s 10,000 or so protected areas together cover about 18 percent of the country, a proportion higher than the global average. Of those protected areas, 2,697 are designated as nature reserves, which confers the highest level of protection. In China, where private land ownership is prohibited, almost all of the reserves are owned by government agencies, usually either the State Forestry Administration or the Ministry of Environmental Protection. Weak management and insufficient funding are threatening conservation efforts in most of the country’s nature reserves.
The country’s strict land ownership laws have historically prevented international NGOs, such as The Nature Conservancy (TNC), from copying their usual conservation approach of setting up private nature reserves in China. That situation started to change in 2008 when the central government decided to promote a program called Collective Forest Tenure Reform on forests owned by collectives, which account for about 58 percent of the country’s total forest. The program allowed commercial activities, which had previously been restricted, in collectively owned forests, opening the door to introduce a lease and contract system into forest management.
Within four years, the first private protected area in China was born in Laohegou, a former state-owned forest farm in Pingwu County in Sichuan province. The new conservation model is known as a land trust reserve. Despite sufficient private funding for the foreseeable future, Laohegou Nature Reserve has struggled to enhance its financial footing. Perhaps more importantly, its relationship with local people whose livelihoods were upended when the reserve came into being is chafing.
Pioneering attempt
Laohegou is a valley with secondary-growth hardwood and bamboo forest that functions as buffer zone between two nature reserves: Baishuijiang National Nature Reserve in Gansu province and Tangjiahe National Nature Reserve in Sichuan. It is not officially designated a protected area, but it nevertheless provides a crucial corridor for wildlife, including the charismatic and endangered giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca). According to the latest national giant panda survey in the area in 2015, 13 pandas live in the valley itself.
The reserve is also home to golden snub-nosed monkeys (Rhinopithecus roxellana), takin (Budorcas taxicolor), Asian black bears (Ursus thibetanus), musk deer (Moschus fuscus), porcupines (family Hystricidae), and numerous butterfly and bird species. The reserve contains the sources of two streams that provide drinking water for downstream villagers.
In 2012, after two years of negotiation, a local foundation at the time called the Sichuan Nature Conservation Foundation, which was mobilized by TNC, sealed an agreement with the Pingwu County government to lease 110 square kilometers of forest in Laohegou and neighboring areas for 50 years. The deal enabled the foundation to establish Laohegou as a private nature reserve, according to Liu Xiaogeng, the director of the Laohegou Nature Reserve Center, which manages the reserve, and a former TNC employee.
The reserve invited a group of scientists from Peking University, Chengdu Institute of Biology, and TNC to form a scientific committee to conduct ecological monitoring and research planning. The scientists completed a background survey of the reserve’s environment and ecological condition in two years, by 2014.
In May of the same year, Laohegou Nature Reserve Center was established to take over managing the reserve from TNC staff. Liu Xiaogeng told Mongabay the reserve’s annual operational spending is around 3 million yuan ($468,000), and it is supported entirely by the foundation, now renamed the Paradise Foundation International. The foundation’s board of directors is comprised of some twenty Chinese entrepreneurs. Jack Ma, the CEO of Alibaba and the Chinese internet tycoon Pony Ma, founder and CEO of Tencent Inc., are the board’s co-chairpersons.
Visiting Laohegou, the effect of just four years of protection is visible: lush trees, clear water, complete tranquility throughout the valley. With logging, hunting, herb-collecting, and other destructive and once-common human activities prohibited, the secondary-growth forest can grow naturally, and the wildlife has revived due to the improved habitat.
“From our perspective, we expected to make it a strictly prohibited-entry area used only for scientific protection,” Liu Xiaogeng told Mongabay in late April in the Pingwu County center. “Yet in reality, there are demands from multiple stakeholders to be balanced.”
One of the major concerns, he said, is the local communities’ desire for development.
Custom-order agriculture
Before the reserve was established, local communities and employees from the state-owned forest farm lived mainly on forest resources through logging, herb collecting, poaching and other activities. When the forest was handed over to private organizations, the new reserve’s top priority was to assist those people in finding alternative livelihoods.
The reserve hired about 20 former employees of the state-owned forest farm to work as rangers, scientific assistants, community coordinators, and logistics operators. The reserve also tries to provide limited work opportunities to residents of neighboring villages.
The closest village to the reserve is Minzhu, with about 280 households, which stands about 3 kilometers south of Laohegou. The reserve’s arrival strictly prohibited villagers’ former activities, including logging, mining, excavating of herbs, poaching, and fishing. Transgressors now face fines and possible jail time, and villagers can only enter the protected valley for entertainment purposes.
“Now we are required to show our ID card at the entrance to prove we are local villagers before we are allowed into the valley,” a woman told Mongabay in front of her house in Minzhu. “The reserve has more or less dwindled our income, particularly from herb collection.”
In order to cultivate a sound neighborly relationship with local communities, and mitigate Minzhu residents’ sacrifices to protect of the valley, the reserve center made various attempts to support village development and create new livelihood opportunities. It tried to help villagers in setting up a self-governance system to decide village affairs, attracting local government investment to improve village facilities.
It also started an innovative model called “custom-order agriculture production.” Simply put, the reserve center arranges for the foundation board’s 20-some members to purchase organic agricultural products directly from local villagers for their own household consumption.
Wang Fang, the reserve center’s administrative officer, told Mongabay that the products include walnuts, peanuts, soybeans, pork, and chicken, and that their price is normally twice that of local non-organic products. Villagers can participate by signing a contract with the center agreeing to refrain from using fertilizers, pesticides, and non-organic feed.
“We invited technical personnel to supervise the whole production process and to examine the products to ensure they are environment-friendly,” Wang Fang said. “Our order for year 2015 amounted to 1.4 million yuan [$220,000] in total.”
Yet both Liu Xiaogeng and Wang Fang admitted that the program’s utility to villagers is limited, since the foundation’s directors and their annual demand for products can easily change. “The current sales platform cannot be ensured to last for the next 50 years,” Wang Fang said. “So we are exploring new market opportunities and the only way to make community development sustainable is to truly commercialize the organic products.”
She acknowledged that won’t be easy, however, considering that the demand for organic products throughout China is much smaller than the potential supply.
“Custom-order agriculture is a pure commercial behavior and it requires both cooperation from local villagers as well as a sound competition system to secure the product quality,” Kang Wei, TNC’s community coordinator in Laohegou told Mongabay, adding “this is not a poverty-alleviation initiative, nor an egalitarian practice.”
Dissenting villages
Many villagers remain unsatisfied with the custom-order agriculture program’s current condition. In Minzhu, a 60-year-old farmer surnamed Yang who was plowing his land to grow maize told Mongabay that only a small number of villagers can join the program.
A middle-aged woman whose family sells pork, peanuts, and walnuts to the foundation’s board members told Mongabay that the purchases are limited. “We cannot make too much money, and the annual income per person is no more than a few thousand yuan, and most young villagers have left seeking working opportunities in big cities,” she said.
A few Minzhu villagers complained that the communications between the reserve and local communities are far from sufficient. The middle-aged woman told Mongabay that the reserve and the village administrative committee offer Minzhu villagers little guidance or instruction in ecological protection. “Only a few representative villagers are asked to attend village meetings addressing ecological protections,” said the woman, whose dissatisfaction with the village leaders was palpable. “All in all, environmental protection cannot be fulfilled by just a few people or representatives,” she added.
Villagers’ dissatisfaction was even keener in neighboring Wuyi village, some two kilometers south of Minzhu. The differences between the two villages are striking. Minzhu has well-paved roads, clear road signs, and carefully trimmed flowerbeds. But Wuyi is plain and dull, typical of most rural Chinese villages.
Cai Changli, 61, owner of a small shop in Wuyi, told Mongabay that the Pingwu County government put more resources and investment into developing and renovating Minzhu village. “We also live in the valley and our livelihood has been affected by the reserve, but why don’t we enjoy the support Minzhu villagers do?” he said. He added that Wuyi villagers also would like to develop organic agriculture products if the direct-purchase program could include them as well.
Similar to Cai Changli, most people living in communities near Laohegou that Mongabay spoke with said the reserve has yet to bring them much benefit. On the contrary, they said their income had declined due to the prohibitions on harvesting herbs and mushrooms inside the reserve.
TNC’s Kang Wei admitted that the reserve so far only focuses its community work in the single village of Minzhu. “We cannot cover all communities in the vicinity, and our main responsibility remains on nature preservation, rather than social and poverty alleviation.,” said Kang.
New tricks
Both the local government and the reserve center are seeking a breakthrough to the present deadlock. For example, to reduce communities’ dependence on forest resources, the Pingwu County government has begun training locals to plant tianma (Rhizoma gastrodiae), a famous traditional Chinese medicine and yangdujun, or morel, (Morchella esculenta,) a pricey mushroom delicacy that can sell for up to 1,600 yuan ($250) per kilogram.
The Paradise Foundation International has enhanced its support to Minzhu by offering villagers microfinancing and an education fund. And the reserve launched an ecotourism program to enhance locals’ income, receiving a limited number of daily visitors since November 2015.
“We also started to offer a tour-guide training program for a dozen Minzhu villagers and expect to increase local communities’ income through eco-tourism,” Wang Fang explained to Mongabay at her office in the reserve center. “Furthermore, we expect to raise awareness among villagers through such means towards nature preservation,” she added. The village is renovating its infrastructure and some households plan to operate homestays to meet visitors’ needs in the long run.
After establishing Laohegou, Paradise Foundation International cooperated with TNC to expand the land trust model to at least three other sites in China. “These new land trust reserves will buffer existing parks and connect nature reserves, creating crucial wildlife corridors that preserve natural habitat for China’s animals, while allowing local communities to pursue environmentally friendly livelihoods,” TNC’s website states. For most, it is too soon to tell whether they will run into problems similar to Laohegou’s.
Su Yang, a researcher at the Development Research Center, a think tank under the State Council (the central Chinese government’s cabinet) told Mongabay earlier this year that a fundamental problem for Laohegou and the other private reserves is that they lack a system to secure long-term financial support.
Liu Xiaogeng, the reserve center’s director, also admitted that the reserve is at a crossroads in its effort to combine ecological protection and the local community’s sustainable development. The first step is to invest in the organic agriculture program to accommodate the increasing number of villagers who are joining, in order to support the local communities’ livelihood in the long run, he said. The second step is for the reserve center to hand over its management rights completely to local communities.
Realizing the reserve’s current limitations, Liu added that these two steps would be Laohegou’s priority over the next two years.
Credits
