China’s Sichuan Reforesting Effort Results in Vast Clear-Cutting of Jobs

Kong Yifu felt lucky to get a job in a county lumberyard last year. Wrestling pine logs onto trucks is hard work, but it paid better than farming in mountainous western China.

Kong will lose that job soon, joining thousands of unintended economic casualties of an attempt to restore the dwindling forests of Sichuan province.

Logging was banned Sept. 1 across swaths of western Sichuan as part of stepped-up conservation efforts across China, spurred by breakneck development’s damage to the environment. After a summer of devastating floods made worse by logging that left bare hillsides unable to catch rain, Chinese leaders could no longer ignore the environmental costs.

Kong and his 170 co-workers at the Maoxian Daqiao Lumber Inspection Station are to be found jobs at hotels and other state-run businesses, county officials told reporters.

The logging ban will wipe out more than 45,000 timber jobs, according to the Sichuan government. For now, it is keeping those workers employed replanting forests they once cut. But it has offered nothing to truckers and other businesses that could be devastated by the loss of a major local industry.

Job losses will hit hard at a time when restructurings of other Chinese state-run industries have put millions out of work. Pressure to create jobs could make it hard for Sichuan to stick to its ban.

Timber companies in Sichuan have been required since 1981 to plant one sapling for each tree cut.

Few did. Forests receded as demand grew for paper, disposable chopsticks, furniture, building materials and other wood products.

Land covered by forest in Sichuan has shrunk from more than 40% in some areas in the 1940s to a province average of 20% today, forestry officials say. Land affected by erosion has nearly doubled, and the province loses 600 million tons of soil a year.

Even those numbers understate the problem, said Liang Congjie, president of Friends of Nature, a nongovernmental ecology group in Beijing. He said Sichuan has as little as 1% of its original trees, noting orchards and other planted land are counted as forest.

Plans call for replanting 350,000 acres, and logging is banned on 11 million acres. Violators can be sentenced to up to five years in a labor camp.

To pay former forestry workers’ salaries and industry retirees’ pensions, the central and provincial governments have promised $150 million annually until 2010.

Similar tree-planting projects are underway or planned in provinces scattered throughout China. In Ningxia in the northwest, a grant from Germany is paying to plant 21,500 acres of trees.

In Sichuan, officials acknowledge that towns dependent on logging will suffer traumatic changes. But they talk optimistically about developing orchards, tourism, manufacturing and cement production.

“This project will be good for future generations,” Deputy Gov. Zhang Zhongwei told reporters in Chengdu, the provincial capital.

An end to logging makes financial sense to the Sichuan government. The industry has lost money for years, surviving on subsidies.

The Western Sichuan Logging Co. in Lixian lost $1.3 million last year, said its president, Qian Lishun. The company was renamed the Western Sichuan Forestry Bureau this year and put in charge of conservation.

Like his father before him, Li Jingui spent 21 years cutting trees in the rugged mountains of Sichuan. Now he is paid to replant them, making the equivalent of $45 a month, compared to as little as $24 in his final days cutting trees for the company.

On a recent morning in Bipeng Gorge, north of Chengdu, the 41-year-old Li and his fellow former lumberjacks sat out an autumn rain in a shelter beside a gully full of felled logs. Outside, three men used a cable strung up the hillside to drag down logs cut before the ban. Not far away, mountain goats grazed among stumps.

“I favor this policy, because . . . the land will be preserved. We will have fewer landslides,” Li said, echoing official policy.

Those who lack connections to the state timber industry and its promise of a new job are much more ambivalent.

A young craftsman making a sofa in a workshop beside the Min River in Dujiangyan, a town of drab concrete buildings north of Chengdu, said the cost of materials already is rising.

“Next year, there might not be any wood,” said the man, who would not give his name for fear of offending authorities.

Asked how he would earn a living, he looked at the saw in his hand and said, “I don’t know.”

The winding road to Bipeng Gorge offers a sobering glimpse of the economic future envisioned for the area by the government. Smoke pours from cement factories. Hills have been dynamited into rubble for raw materials.

The government plans to build more cement plants, but at the same time it wants to promote the area’s natural beauty for tourism.

Developing other industries will be difficult in isolated valleys reached by narrow, winding roads frequently damaged by landslides.

Tourism companies have visited to plan nature outings, said Peng Huangshi, chief engineer for the provincial Department of Forest Industries. But there are no commitments yet of private funds. “If anyone wants to invest, we warmly welcome them,” Peng said.