Laotian forest life shrinking

VIENTIANE, Laos - The mighty animals that had made Laos the Kingdom of a Million Elephants are mostly gone. And every year, the forests that once blanketed the country are replaced by more bald hillsides and scrubland, where hardly a bird’s song is heard.

Long spared the depredations that scarred neighboring Vietnam, Thailand and China, the 5.6 million people of Laos still enjoy a high ratio of water and forest resources, including 800 bird and 100 mammal species ranging from tigers to the recently discovered giant muntjac and saola.

But conservationists are alarmed at what has been eradicated in less than a generation. They fear that minimal environmental programs run by the creaky Communist Party machinery, riddled with corruption and supported by limited foreign aid, has no chance to slow the destruction.

They argue that short-term profits from profligate logging and other ventures will be a disaster in the long run.

“The only thing Laos can offer economically is its natural resources and biodiversity. That is its comparative advantage. If it loses that, it’s done for,” said Roland Eve, country director of the World Wide Fund for Nature.

Disappearing woodlands

Laos is one of the world’s poorest and least-developed nations, and the pressure is intense to build hydroelectric dams and sell off tropical forests, legally or otherwise.

Traveling the 280-mile length of National Highway 13, which runs north-south through the heart of Laos, the only patches of viable forest are inside ravines or on mountain slopes too steep to log. During the dry season, smoke from woodlands cleared for farming casts a hazy shroud.

Forest cover has shrunk from 70 percent of the country’s total area in the middle of the 20th century to less than 40 percent today — and possibly far lower, environmentalists say.

Many woodlands are described as “dead” because of overhunting.

Near the northern town of Udomxai, a girl of the Kamu tribe holds up two dead civet cats by their tails alongside several braces of tiny birds, trying to tempt passing bus passengers. In the town’s market, civet meat, selling for 90 cents a pound, lies next to the carcasses of multicolored parrots and other forest creatures.

“Everything in Laos is considered food, except maybe cockroaches,” said Troy Hansel of the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society.

Wildlife also is used in traditional medicines and tonics, such as a concoction of leaf monkey, porcupine stomach and bamboo rat mixed in alcohol that is said to infuse its drinkers with the power of trees (because all three animals feed on them).

Trade threat

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