BOKEO, Laos — Kongkaew Vonusak smiles when he recalls the arrival of Chinese investors in his tranquil village in northern Laos in 2014. With them came easy money, he said.

The Chinese offered villagers up to US$720 per hectare to rent their land, much of it fallow for years, said Kongkaew, 59, the village chief. They wanted to grow bananas on it.

In impoverished Laos, the offer was generous. “They told us the price and asked us if we were happy. We said okay.”

Elsewhere, riverside land with good access roads fetched at least double that sum.

Three years later, the Chinese-driven banana boom has left few locals untouched, but not everyone is smiling.

Experts say the Chinese have brought jobs and higher wages to northern Laos, but have also drenched plantations with pesticides and other chemicals.

Last year, the Lao government banned the opening of new banana plantations after a state-backed institute reported that the intensive use of chemicals had sickened workers and polluted water sources.

China has extolled the benefits of its vision of a modern-day “Silk Road” linking it to the rest of the world—it held a major summit in Beijing on May 14-15 to promote it.

The banana boom pre-dated the concept, which was announced in 2013, although China now regards agricultural developments in Laos as among the initiative’s projects.

Under the “Belt and Road” plan, China has sought to persuade neighbors to open their markets to Chinese investors. For villagers like Kongkaew, that meant a trade-off.

“Chinese investment has given us a better quality of life. We eat better, we live better,” Kongkaew said.

But neither he nor his neighbors will work on the plantations, or venture near them during spraying. They have stopped fishing in the nearby river, fearing it is polluted by chemical run-off from the nearby banana plantation.

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Chinese Frustration

Several Chinese plantation owners and managers expressed frustration at the government ban, which forbids them from growing bananas after their leases expire.

They said the use of chemicals was necessary, and disagreed that workers were falling ill because of them.

“If you want to farm, you have to use fertilizers and pesticides,” said Wu Yaqiang, a site manager at a plantation owned by Jiangong Agriculture, one of the largest Chinese banana growers in Laos.

“If we don’t come here to develop, this place would just be bare mountains,” he added, as he watched workers carrying 30-kilogram bunches of bananas up steep hillsides to a rudimentary packing station.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said he was not aware of the specific issues surrounding Chinese banana growers in Laos, and did not believe they should be linked directly to the Belt and Road initiative.

“In principle we always require Chinese companies, when investing and operating abroad, to comply with local laws and regulations, fulfill their social responsibility and protect the local environment,” he told a regular briefing on Thursday.

Laos’ Ministry of Agriculture did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment for this article.

China is the biggest foreign investor in Laos, a landlocked country of 6.5 million people, with over 760 projects valued at about $6.7 billion, according to Chinese state-run media.

This influence is not only keenly felt in the capital Vientiane, where Chinese build shopping complexes and run some of the city’s fanciest hotels. It also extends deep into rural areas that have remained largely unchanged for decades.

Banana Rush

Lao people say Chinese banana investors began streaming across the border around 2010, driven by land shortages at home. Many headed to Bokeo, the country’s smallest and least populous province.

In the ensuing years, Lao banana exports jumped ten-fold to become the country’s largest export earner. Nearly all of the fruit is sent to China.

For ethnic Lao like Kongkaew, Chinese planters paid them more for the land than they could earn from farming it.

For impoverished, hill-dwelling minorities such as the Hmong or Khmu, the banana rush meant better wages.

At harvest time, they can earn the equivalent of at least $10 a day and sometimes double that, a princely sum in a country where the average annual income was $1,740 in 2015, according to the World Bank. They are also most exposed to the chemicals.

Most Chinese planters grow the Cavendish variety of banana, which is favored by consumers but susceptible to disease.

Hmong and Khmu workers douse the growing plants with pesticides and kill weeds with herbicides such as paraquat. Paraquat is banned by the European Union and other countries including Laos, and it has been phased out in China.

The bananas are also dunked in fungicides to preserve them for their journey to China.

Switching Crops

Some banana workers grow weak and thin or develop rashes, said Phonesai Manivongxai, director of the Community Association for Mobilizing Knowledge in Development (CAMKID), a non-profit group based in northern Laos.

Part of CAMKID’s work includes educating workers about the dangers of chemical use. “All we can do is make them more aware,” she said.

This is an uphill struggle. Most pesticides come from China or Thailand and bear instructions and warnings in those countries’ languages, Reuters learned. Even if the labeling was Lao, some Hmong and Khmu are illiterate and can’t understand it.

Another problem, said Phonesai, was that workers lived in close proximity to the chemicals, which contaminated the water they wash in or drink.

In a Lao market, Reuters found Thai-made paraquat openly on sale.

However, some workers Reuters spoke to said they accepted the trade-off. While they were concerned about chemicals, higher wages allowed them to send children to school or afford better food.

There is no guarantee the government’s crackdown on pesticide use in banana production will lead to potentially harmful chemicals being phased out altogether.

As banana prices fell following a surge in output, some Chinese investors began to plant other crops on the land, including chemically intensive ones like watermelon.

Zhang Jianjun, 46, co-owner of the Lei Lin banana plantation, estimated that as much as 20 percent of Bokeo’s banana plantations had been cleared, and said some of his competitors had decamped to Burma and Cambodia.

But he has no plans to leave. The environmental impact on Laos was a “road that every underdeveloped country must walk” and local people should thank the Chinese, he said.

“They don’t think, ‘Why have our lives improved?’ They think it’s something that heaven has given them, that life just naturally gets better.”

By Reuters 16 May 2017 – Photos : Jorge Silva/ Reuters

KAN NGU VILLAGE, Arakan State – Until fairly recently, the residents of Kan Ngu, a coastal village in southern Arakan State, had considered the mangroves in their area simply as another source of firewood and paid little attention to the shrinking forest.

“The locals did not carry out mangrove conservation in the past and cut it down without permission,” recalled Kyaw Win, a 62-year-old former fisherman and village leader.

But then, a few years ago, international aid groups began to implement community projects that raised awareness of the mangroves’ important role in protecting the coastal environment and local attitudes quickly changed, he said.“The locals now understand the impacts of mangrove deforestation and they no longer destroy the forest,” Kyaw Win said. “These mangrove forests are our benefactor, they are the habitat of fish, prawns and crabs. And we can earn money from catching these animals.” He added the he and other villagers had set up a local committee to conserve the mangrove ecosystem.

Mangroves are not only an important habitat, but also help protect the coastal environment against land erosion and floods caused by storms and occasional cyclones that lash the Arakan coast during rainy season.

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The Kan Ngu Village committee is one of dozens that have been created in communities in southern Arakan in recent years with the help of the Livelihoods and Food Security Trust Fund (LIFT). This poverty reduction donor fund supported by 12 governments launched the CLEARR project in the area in 2011 to help mangrove rehabilitation and provide agricultural and livelihood support.

Mangroves have been disappearing all along Burma’s coast, mostly due to human pressures, with an estimated loss of half of the 1.6 million acres of forest between 1980 and 2007, according to Maung Maung Kyi, a co-founder of the Arakan Coastal Region Conservation Association.

Community projects appear to have stemmed the loss of mangrove forests in southern Arakan State. (Htet Khaung Linn / Myanmar Now)

The densely populated Irrawaddy Delta suffered the biggest losses and only a fraction of the mangroves remain, but in southern Arakan, conservation and reforestation efforts by local communities are starting to take root.

Maung Maung Kyi said the local committees helped restore some 12,000 acres of mangrove in Gwa Township, 30,000 acres in Thandwe Township and 65,000 acres in Taungup Township in recent years.

“Compared to other areas, mangrove forests in Arakan remain strong. Some of the most diverse and rare species of mangrove forests in Southeast Asia are still found there,” he said.

Okkar, an officer at the Thandwe Township Forest Department, agreed that the tide could now be turning for mangrove ecosystems in southern Arakan State. “Mangrove reforestation has expanded thanks to the locals. It is a good trend,” he said.

In Kan Ngu, the Mangrove Conservation Group restored some 500 acres of forest. However, Kyaw Win and other local environmentalists said the mangroves continue to be threatened and warn that a lack of active government support is causing the community initiatives to lose steam.

Kyaw Win said the biggest threat to the mangroves comes from roving groups of migrating workers and loggers from the Irrawaddy Region. They have been cutting down southern Arakan’s mangroves since around 2009 to turn them into charcoal for sale in towns and cities.

“These commercial [charcoal] producers take out both small and big mangrove plants, and do illegal logging by motorboat,” he said. “They are still doing this business here as the authorities are turning a blind eye… We are angry about their actions as we have reforested these mangroves.”

Kyaw Win and another activist, Than Win from the Gwa Township Mangrove Conservation Committee, both recounted separate incidents in their villages during which residents apprehended loggers and handed them over to authorities, who then failed to act.

“We arrested the people who illegally cut the community mangroves last year and handed them over to the township forestry department and forest police. But they released them, as well as their tools, just after we left,” said Than Win.

Okkar, the Forest Department officer, claimed the authorities could take no legal action against the loggers as mangroves, including those being conserved by the communities, often lack official protected status.

“The authorities are preparing to turn these mangrove forests into protected areas as a measure to prevent deforestation,” he said, without offering details on how long it would take for the plans to be implemented.

Kyaw Win said villagers had contacted their state parliamentarians and appealed to Forest Department officials during public workshops, but there had been no reaction from authorities.

He said many locals had now “lost their enthusiasm” for protecting the mangroves because of a lack of government support, while villagers had increasingly come into conflict with the loggers, who continue to clear mangroves without government interference.

“The Forestry Department staff [approach] only fosters conflict between locals and loggers. We suggest that senior government officials end these practices,” Kyaw Win said.

Maung Maung Kyi, of the Arakan Coastal Region Conservation Association, agreed more should be done from the government side to ensure better mangrove conservation. “The government needs to protect these forests from commercial activities and it should promote fuel substitution technologies” to replace charcoal making, he said.

By Htet Khaung Lynn 13 May 2017

SAGAING, Burma — Pyar Aung still remembers the first time he saw a chainsaw. It was a German-made number being used by one of the logging companies operating in the forest around his remote village in Burma’s northwest Sagaing Division in 2013.
“It was so powerful and fast!” recalls 50-year-old Aung, who lives in the tiny village of Mahu. It wasn’t until August 2016 that he got one himself, and today he owns three.
Each cost him around US$124, though cheaper versions can be purchased in urban centers for about 7 times less. In spite of the law, he said he was never asked to show paperwork to buy the chainsaws, nor were any of his fellow villagers.
The claim is surprising given the fact that logging is practically a cottage industry in his community. Among 37 households they own 70 chainsaws. On a recent visit there, they also said they weren’t aware of the fairly new regulation implemented in 2016 that requires them to register their chainsaws with Burma’s Forestry Department.