Forests Are Gold
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Forests Are Gold

Trees, People, and Environmental Rule in Vietnam

Pamela D. McElwee, K. Sivaramakrishnan

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eBook - ePub

Forests Are Gold

Trees, People, and Environmental Rule in Vietnam

Pamela D. McElwee, K. Sivaramakrishnan

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Forests Are Gold examines the management of Vietnam's forests in the tumultuous twentieth century—from French colonialism to the recent transition to market-oriented economics—as the country united, prospered, and transformed people and landscapes. Forest policy has rarely been about ecology or conservation for nature's sake, but about managing citizens and society, a process Pamela McElwee terms "environmental rule." Untangling and understanding these practices and networks of rule illuminates not just thorny issues of environmental change, but also the birth of Vietnam itself.

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Year
2016
ISBN
9780295806464

1Forests for Profit or Posterity?

The Emergence of Environmental Rule under French Colonialism

COLONIALISM IN INDOCHINA OFFICIALLY BEGAN WITH EMPEROR Tự Đức’s acceptance of France’s claims on Cochinchina in 1862, and the later establishment of French protectorate status over Cambodia in 1867, Annam and Tonkin in 1884, and Laos in 1893. Among other changes, the colonial enterprise brought new forestry laws and management practices to Indochina, which played important roles in the transformation of the human and natural environment. Before it was possible to cut timber for railways and telegraph poles for the expansion of the empire, it was necessary to define those spaces in which this extraction would be allowed to occur, and where it would not.
Environmental rule thus first emerged from the colonial state and relied on the problematization of forests as depleted due to native practices and in need of protection and management organized by the new authorities. As French administrators set up the first forestry institutions, they spoke often of environmental concerns, particularly regarding the links between forests and water supplies, but in reality, other justifications dominated state forest policy. These included the need to fund the forest service through leases and taxes on private concessions, given the stingy funding of the colonial enterprise by France, and the need to control and settle native populations, given worries that opposition to forest regulations might coalesce into opposition to French rule generally.
This process was quite typical of the Southeast Asian colonial experience, as scholars have identified this era as one of “political forests,” or the designation of forests based on political and economic criteria to be managed as a responsibility of the state (Peluso and Vandergeest 2001). This is not to say that the state was always an active forest manager itself, but rather that the state set the boundaries of the definitions of forests, determined the actors who could and could not use forests, and arbitrated disputes that might arise between actors. As elsewhere in Asia, the colonial period first codified Indochina’s forests into an entity to be controlled by the state via techniques of intervention, such as spatially delimited territories and economic regulation through taxes, permits, and concessions (Buchy 1993; Thomas 1999). New forest controls attempted to limit native harvesting by cracking down on practices deemed especially destructive, such as the use of fire and shifting cultivation.
As in all projects of environmental rule, knowledge was key to the imperial forest mission. French foresters arriving in the new colony problematized unorganized and unscientific forest use as the main cause of degradation. To control these local practices, knowledge had to be produced about both landscapes and people. New botanical gardens and scientific research institutes emerged and catalogues of species and maps of forest cover were composed. Studies also had to be initiated on how to apply locally the professional forestry practiced in France, as experiences with temperate, Alpine, and Mediterranean species were of little use in the tropical world. Analyses were done of the local climate services provided by forests and their linkages to downstream water flow; these took on an added importance after 1915 when a flood on the Red River nearly wiped out Hanoi, the capital city of Tonkin and seat of French colonial rule. The people in forested areas, both Vietnamese and ethnic minorities, were similarly studied, particularly their use of fire to burn forests for agricultural planting in swidden fields and to create pastures for livestock, as this was considered a major driver of deforestation, not to mention a waste of timber that could be providing revenue for the colonies.
The proposed solution to the myriad woes of poor quality forests, low timber yields, and undisciplined forest use by local people was new state interventions: the establishment of forest reserves where exploitation could be rationalized. New forest regulations would be codified and physically posted in villages to restrict local forest use to certain stands and to keep populations out of more valued reserves for which the French forest service would have exclusive authority. Yet these “Reserved Forests,” though often justified on environmental grounds, were not to be conservation areas where ecological protection could be assured. Rather, they would be subject to methodical treatment through rotational cutting plans, and rights to timber sold for public auction by private contractors, as was done in state forests in France, with tax revenues going to colonial authorities.
Yet these extensive knowledge practices and interventions in local conduct failed to induce locals to change their forest use practices or produce compliant colonial subjects. Authorities could not establish extensive state-managed forests due to low personnel levels and the late and contested nature of France’s presence in the region. And unlike the case with other French colonial holdings, particularly in Africa, ecological conditions in Indochina also prevented ambitious plans from being realized: the difficulty of logging and the highly diverse ecology of Indochinese forests kept forest administrators continually worried about financial losses. Even this somewhat lax forest management system did not create new forest subjects willing to engage in conservation, but rather alienated many locals who were subjected to new controls, such as limits on the collection of fuelwood or duties and taxes imposed upon timber. These access restrictions, and the local protests that accompanied them, played an important role in sparking rural unrest that was directly tied to the emergence of the Indochinese Communist Party in the 1930s, which was to wrest back control of the country under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh. In this way, the era of French colonial forestry provides an illuminating lens into the birth of not only environmental rule, but also modern Vietnam itself.

FORESTRY FROM THE METROPOLE TO THE COLONY

To a large degree, colonial forestry in Indochina was shaped by experiences imported directly from the French countryside. There, fears of rapid deforestation due to expanding agriculture, construction, and commerce from the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries resulted in an Ordinance on Waterways and Forests promulgated by the king’s finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert in 1669. The new ordinance contained no fewer than five hundred articles, pertaining to both royal and private woodlands, and “gave the king significant new rights over French forests and notably expanded royal prerogative” (Pincetl 1993, 81). Two primary components of the ordinance stood out: first, the requirement that each forest of a minimum size should be divided into compartments and felled in rotation with standards (seed trees) left behind. Second, the state enforcement of laws over forests was strengthened through a new centralized bureaucracy and criminalization of forest infractions (Bamford 1955). Knowledge production and standardization were fundamental to this emergent state forestry apparatus; for example, the new Ordinance defined common units of measurement for woodlands and even bundles of fuelwood, and required private wood-owners to make detailed reports of wood felling (Graham 1999).
Such efforts did not succeed in slowing deforestation, however, as “the effectiveness of forest law seems to have tended to decrease as the physical distance from Versailles increased” (Bamford 1956, 85). The post-revolution founding of the École Nationale des Eaux et Forêts (National School of Water Resources and Forestry) at Nancy in 1824 marked a significant turning point. So did a new forest law in 1827 that reiterated precepts from the 1669 ordinance, but which further consolidated formerly communal forests under state regulations. An additional impetus was massive floods in 1840 and 1855, which increased attention to the links between deforestation and water flow from upland areas.1 Pointedly, foresters blamed the local peasantry living in Alpine areas as the cause of mountainous degradation and set about focusing forest restrictions in these areas, which not coincidentally also lay on the edges of the consolidating French nation (Whited 2000b).

TRANSPLANTING FORESTRY PRACTICES

These experiences from the French countryside must have been much in the minds of officials who arrived in the Indochinese colonies tasked with developing a nascent forest service. Unfortunately, we do not have a good understanding of the extent of forests or local management practices at the time the French first arrived, as there is no comprehensive assessment of environmental resources for the precolonial era.2 Goods from forested areas had long been important in maritime trade, used as tribute linking the Vietnamese court to other imperial dynasties in the region (Werner et al. 2012).3 The royal demand for certain forest products drove some early conservation regulations on species that the Emperor prioritized, such as hardwoods for coffins (Fangeaux 1931). Emperor Minh Mạng (r. 1820–41) also made the cinnamon trade from wild trees a royal monopoly, as it was highly profitable (Hickey 1982). There is no indication, however, that the early courts created any protected forest areas, nor attempted to restrict forest use beyond a few favored species. For example, there are no records of taxes or restrictions on forest land in the detailed Nguyễn dynasty chronicles such as the Institutions of the Successive Dynasties (Lịch tri
image
u hiến chương loại chí)4 or the Unification Records of Đại Nam (Đại Nam nhất thống chí).5 The royal court also did not attempt to restrict the use of swidden fields for agriculture among the non-Vietnamese populations in the highlands on the edges of the imperial domain (Tạ Văn Tài 1985).
Thus, when France claimed Indochina, it began to impose a forest regulatory system different than previous dynasties. Forest management proved an important concern from the very beginning, as the need for mundane technologies of colonial rule, such as telegraph wires and railway sleepers, necessitated much forest felling. In 1862, just months after the first provinces of Cochinchina fell to the French military, the governor, Admiral Bonard, issued a decree that certain trees (known as “classified species”) were to be used exclusively for public works of road and shipbuilding (Guilliard 2010). At the same time as the military began increasing their demands for timber in Cochinchina, they noted their concern with local use of forests, complaining that:
The responsibility of mayors, with respect to the conservation of wood of their commune, is absolutely nil, and since we know their extent and capacity, no serious control can be exercised over the cutting of trees, because of the scarcity of resources available to inspectors. . . . [A]ll previously existing associations for the preservation of such species have disappeared today, and the administration cannot rely on either community authorities or private interests to prevent unnecessary damage, fire without cause, or fraudulent operations. (Pierre et al. 1866, in Thomas 2000, 54)
In response to these and other concerns, administrators created a new Forest Service for Cochinchina in 1866, and in 1875 passed the first law on the protection of forests. Certain species were placed on regulated lists to prevent excessive harvesting (sixty-three species total had minimum felling diameters), and three forest reserves were set up in Thủ D
image
u Một province where logging would be more strictly enforced (Thomas 2000, 58) (see map 1.01). The new law on forest protection also laid out rules for reforestation, and heavy fines for those who illegally logged or allowed livestock grazing in forests.6 However, the actual number of people involved in the Cochinchinese Forest Service remained low, estimated at under a hundred by the turn of the century.
Paul Doumer’s accession as the governor-general of Indochina in 1897 led to an overall centralization of many aspects of colonial life, including in forest management. A Forest Service (Service Forestier) was established for each division of the Indochinese Union, along with a local Forest Law, with a central overseeing office in the Directorate General of Agriculture and Forestry in Hanoi.7 As was the case in nearly all French colonies, the new forest laws were based in part on the 1669 and 1827 Forest Codes from France, considered “the bible” of forest management (Madec 1997).8 The laws in both the metropole and the colonies focused primarily on the state as land manager, the use of working plans for rotational felling for sustainable timber production, and strong criminal provisions for violations of the law. The Indochinese laws were considered to be so well constructed and comprehensive that they were held up as an example for laws in other colonies, such as Madagascar and West Africa.9
image
MAP 1.01 The French colonial possessions of Annam, Tonkin, and Cochinchina, showing provinces and cities mentioned in text. Base map from 1914. Brenier, Essai d’Atlas statistique de l’Indochine française. Redrawn by author.
However, despite the comprehensive laws, the institutions that were needed to enforce these regulations emerged slowly. The new Forest Services began to hire personnel but had to be led by French men (the heads of departments were additionally required to have attended forestry school in Nancy, France), thereby making it difficult to recruit (Thomas 2000).10 We can see the challenges by looking specifically at Annam, the site of the most extensive forest resources within Vietnam. In 1906, a Forest Service management structure arose, which divided the protectorate’s forests into individual cantonments (cantonnements forestiers). Each cantonment was to be exclusively run by a European agent, under whom were forest divisions and posts staffed with patrol guards, who tended to be locals.11 By 1919, Annam claimed six cantonments, headquartered in Bến Thủy, Thanh Hóa, Huế, Tourane, Phan Thiết, and Đà Lạt cities, employing 30 European agents and 156 native forest guards. However, ten years later, only 42 European agents and 232 guards served for all the forests of Annam, an area of approximately six million hectares (Fangeaux 1931).12

FOREST PROBLEMATIZATION AND THE EMERGENCE OF ENVIRONMENTAL RULE

The creation of a Forest Service required the identification, mapping, and classification of forest stands, to which the new regulations on use and exploitation would be applied. The laws on forestry for Indochina had been passed before any specific scientific assessments of the type of forests and the requisite silvicultural treatments that might be needed to produce timber sustainably had been undertaken; forests were simply created through legislation. Officials made initial determinations of the ecological types of forests visually, without systematic data collection, and these proved deceptive. Labels of “forêt inexplorée” in maps of the time promised ric...

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