มร.Doeke Bonga และวริยา ลุลิตานนท์ นำคณะร่วมปล่อยเต่าสู่ท้องทะเล ที่ชายหาดหน้า รร.อิมพีเรียล โบ๊ทเฮ้าส์ รีสอร์ท สมุย. เพื่อเป็นส่วนหนึ่งในการร่วมอนุรักษ์โลกใบนี้ ให้คงอยู่ตราบนานเท่านาน ได้จุดประกายให้กลุ่มโรงแรมในเครืออิมพีเรียลภายในประเทศทั้ง 12 โรงแรม ของ เจ้าสัวเจริญ สิริวัฒนภักดี เกิดแนวคิดที่จะร่วมอนุรักษ์สิ่งแวดล้อมและธรรมชาติ และได้เริ่มจัดกิจกรรม “ดูแลโลกไปกับเครืออิมพีเรียล” ขึ้นครั้งแรกเมื่อปีที่แล้วนี้เอง โดยร่วมกันทำความ สะอาดภายในบริเวณโรงแรมและรอบๆภายนอกให้สะอาดน่าอยู่ และปีนี้ก็ได้เพิ่มกิจกรรมปลูกต้นไม้ เพื่อเพิ่มเติมพื้นที่สีเขียวให้มากขึ้น เมื่อวันเอิร์ธเดย์ที่ผ่านมา และเพื่อสานต่อแนวคิดดีๆนี้ เมื่อวันวิสาขบูชา (24 พ.ค.56) มร.Doeke Bonga ผู้จัดการทั่วไป รร.อิมพีเรียล โบ๊ทเฮ้าส์ บีช รีสอร์ท เกาะสมุย และวริยา ลุลิตานนท์ ผู้จัดการฝ่ายสื่อสารการตลาดบริษัท ทีซีซี โฮเต็ล กรุ๊ป ได้จัดกิจกรรม “เรารักษ์ทะเลกับเครือโรงแรมอิมพีเรียล” ขึ้นที่บริเวณชายหาดหน้าโรงแรม โดยได้รับการอนุเคราะห์ประชากรเต่าจากศูนย์วิจัยและพัฒนาทรัพยากรทางทะเลและชายฝั่งอ่าวไทยตอนกลาง ในการปล่อยเต่าคืนสู่ท้องทะเล โดยคุณดุ๊ก จีเอ็มของ รร.อิมพีเรียล โบ๊ทเฮ้าส์ฯ กล่าวว่า เรามีความมุ่งมั่นและตั้งใจที่จะจัดกิจกรรมดีๆ เช่น การปล่อยเต่าทะเลคืนสู่ท้องทะเลเช่นนี้ในทุกๆปี เป็นการกระตุ้นสำนึกรักสิ่งแวดล้อมและธรรมชาติ เพื่อให้คนรุ่นหลังได้มีโอกาสสัมผัสความงามอย่างแท้จริงของธรรมชาติสืบไป ทั้งนี้ จากการวิจัยพบว่า เต่าทะเลในธรรมชาติ มีอัตราการรอดตายและเจริญเติบโตถึงขนาดเป็นพ่อพันธุ์แม่พันธุ์ได้เพียง 0.01% เท่านั้น ศูนย์วิจัยและพัฒนาทรัพยากรทางทะเลและชายฝั่งอ่าวไทยตอนกลาง ซึ่งไม่เพียงแต่มีหน้าที่แค่ฟักไข่เต่าทะเลเท่านั้น แต่ยังมีหน้าที่ต้องเลี้ยงดูลูกเต่าให้มีขนาดโตขึ้นจนอายุประมาณ 1 ปี เพื่อให้แน่ใจว่าลูกเต่าสามารถอยู่รอดด้วยตัวเอง เพื่อปล่อยคืนสู่ธรรมชาติต่อไป ซึ่งจะช่วย ฟื้นฟูความสมบูรณ์ของท้องทะเล และขณะเดียวกันยังช่วยเสริมสร้างศักยภาพการท่องเที่ยวเชิงนิเวศน์อีกด้วย

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tomiyoshi Kurogoushi sighs as he looks over the terraced rice fields in the mountains of central Japan that were tended by generations of his family. Most are now covered in weeds and silver grass.

The area of land Kurogoushi still farms in Yabu, Hyogo prefecture, has shrunk to little more than a small plot around his house where he and his wife Yoko grow potatoes, cabbages and carrots to feed themselves and his mother. Rather than sow rice, the 66-year-old works at a ski resort as a general manager.

“Farmland is deteriorating as people here are getting old,” said Kurogoushi, whose two daughters married and moved away. “Even though we have the land for farming, we can’t really keep doing it. Paddy fields have to be tilled or they’ll be ruined.”

Across Japan it’s the same story. The area of abandoned arable land has almost doubled in the past 20 years as the population gets older and young adults that grew up in rural areas like Yabu move to the big cities to find work. This sleepy community was thrust into the national spotlight after being chosen in March by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s administration as a test-bed for the revival of the nation’s declining provinces.

Along with five other areas, Yabu, 600 kilometers west of Tokyo, was designated as a strategic special zone, with the promise to loosen regulations in areas such as agriculture, medicine and labor. The idea is to create development blueprints as part of Abe’s crusade to pull the country out of two decades of economic doldrums.

 

Dark Horse

While most of the other zones are well-known regional centers of industry, agriculture or tourism, Yabu is the dark horse, a little-known semi-mountainous area with a varied past spanning silk farming, tin mining and rice cultivation.

“Now is the last chance to revive agriculture,” said Sakae Hirose, mayor of Yabu. “In three to five years, the old farmers will lay down their plows, the farmland will be left uncultivated and Yabu will fall into decline. We have to create an environment where new entrants can easily come in.”

Like most provincial towns in Japan, the twin forces of emigration and a falling birth rate have hollowed out the community. By 2060, the government estimates four out of 10 people in Japan will be 65 or older, up from a quarter now. In Yabu, it’s already a third, according to the 2010 census.

Yabu’s selection as a special zone was prompted by the determination of Hirose and his team to restructure farming practices to reverse that decline, said Heizo Takenaka, a member of a government council on the zones and a professor at Keio University. The mayor’s plans may include taking over authority for land sales from the farmer-run local agricultural committee.

 

Mountainous Merger

“We’re greatly impressed by Yabu’s enthusiasm and passion for reform,” said Takenaka at a seminar in Tokyo in April. “The special zone probably won’t be successful without this determination.”

Abe’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga met Hirose and farmers in Yabu on July 5 and said the area could become a model for other semi-mountainous regions in the country, the Yomiuri newspaper reported.

Yabu’s municipal status was upgraded in 2004, when it was merged with a series of towns strung out along the mountainous valleys of the Maruyama River and its tributaries. Almost half of the nation’s municipal districts have vanished in the past 15 years because of such mergers, which are designed to cut administrative costs as the number of residents dwindles. The combined population of Yabu’s merged towns declined 41 percent to 26,501 in 2010, from 44,884 in 1960.

“It is a microcosm of many of the issues facing Japan,” said Robert Feldman, head of Japan economic research at Morgan Stanley MUFG in Tokyo. “Yabu is an example of how a local initiative can fight against vested interests and try to address the structural problems in the economy.”

 

Ancient Silk

Records show the area was producing silk more than a thousand years ago. By the 19th century, sericulture, as it’s known, was the key industry for the region. A book on the subject by local son Morikuni Uegaki was translated and published in France and Italy in 1848 and is regarded as one of Japan’s first exports of technology.

For more than half a century after U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry opened Japan to trade in 1854, the local silk-reeling factories boomed and raw silk was the country’s leading export as late as the 1930s. The industry declined during and after World War II, under competition from new artificial fibers like nylon, and the region turned to another resource: mining.

Prospectors had sought gold in the hills for centuries around the town of Sekinomiya. In 1909, miners found tin near the village of Akenobe, which soon became a boomtown as the deposit became the biggest source of the metal in Japan.

 

Boom Town

Hiromasa Saito, who used to work as an electrical engineer at the mine, remembers the days when new movies were played every week at the cinema, electricity and water were free, and the town attracted top artists Chiyoko Shimakura, known as “The Goddess of Enka,” a traditional Japanese music style.

Now Akenobe and other towns around Yabu are disappearing, said Saito, 65. “There are many marginal hamlets just like Akenobe. Something has to be done, before it’s too late.”

Today the area’s revenue is supplemented by tourism from the ski resorts in Hachibuse, a high plateau west of Yabu, where stone tools and pottery have been found dating back more than 10,000 years.

To stem the decline by going back to the land, Yabu needs to break free of the entrenched restrictions that dominate Japan’s agriculture. Companies wanting to own farmland must set up agricultural corporations subject to complex rules. The purchase of farmland must be approved by the farmers’ committee, providing a veto over admitting outsiders. Farmers also back the Japan Agricultural Cooperatives group, a powerful lobby that largely controls rice distribution and campaigns to maintain government price supports.

Value Chain

Yabu’s special-zone status clears the way to alter some of those restrictions and find a way to make the land more profitable, switching from rice to higher-value produce and adding processing and packaging operations to create employment.

“It’s a good thing that the name of Yabu has become known nationwide,” said Yukio Umetani, 65, a full-time farmer who grows rice and a local specialty pepper called “Asakura Sansho.” “Young people have moved to bigger cities and only old people have stayed. I’m all for it if new entrants work out well with local people.”

About a third of Umetani’s acre of farmland is untilled.

Still, nervousness about an influx of outsiders runs deep for locals like Yasunari Uegaki, a descendant of the silk pioneer Morikuni. At 48, he’s one of Yabu’s younger farmers. He breeds Tajima cattle, Japanese black calves raised to produce Kobe beef, as well as organic rice. Ducks that swim in his rice paddies are processed into smoked meat that he sells on the Internet.

Future Generations

“The city administration is too far ahead on the special zone and is leaving farmers behind,” Uegaki said. “We need to think about future generations, not just look at the next five or 10 years.”

Even before Yabu gained special-zone status, one company has been using the town to test new agricultural methods. A unit of the real-estate arm of ORIX Corp. (8591), a Tokyo-based financial services provider, converted an abandoned school gymnasium to grow lettuces under artificial light.

Plant Manager Hiroki Yoshida said he’s hired 14 locals and expects the special zone status to boost Yabu’s brand in Japan.

“If Yabu is successful in raising the living standard and improving production, then that will be a shining example to other communities around the country of how to make a major reform in the agricultural sector,” said Morgan Stanley’s Feldman. “It also will show people that you can raise the living standards and keep young people in the regional cities.”

For residents like Kurogoushi, who worked for more than 40 years at the Yabu tourist office, while most of his 6.5-hectares of terraces fell into disrepair, there’s little choice.

“We’ve got to do something,” he said. “It’s a ray of hope.”

 

 

ที่มา http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-07-09/ancient-silk-town-paves-way-for-japan-s-abandoned-rice-fields.html

KALKILL, Vietnam — Before the patrollers spotted the interlopers, they heard the sounds of illegal logging.

When the two groups finally met, violence erupted and rocks flew, according to one of the patrollers, Huynh Van Nghia. He later spent months recovering from injuries he received in the scuffle, which occurred in a forest near the village of Kalkill in Vietnam’s Central Highlands. A few of the two dozen loggers were wounded, too, he added.

Mr. Nghia and the other patrollers, a band of about 30 farmers, essentially work as freelance park rangers under a 2010 law that established a nationwide incentive program in which companies — mainly state-owned hydropower operations — pay communities to protect watersheds.

“I’m part of this program because I feel a responsibility to my community and that I should protect nature,” said Mr. Nghia, who receives about 3 million dong, or $142, a year in exchange for patrolling 74 acres of state-owned land. The payments amount to 3 percent to 6 percent of his family’s annual income from farming coffee, passion fruit and other crops.

Variations on this program have been applied around the world to water, soil and forest conservation projects. New York City introduced incentives to protect water quality in the Hudson River Valley, for example, and China gave farmers cash and grain subsidies to convert sloping cropland to forests in a bid to prevent catastrophic floods.

But Vietnam, which, like China, has a state-dominated economy and forestry sector, has made ecosystem payments a national policy.

Government officials say nearly half of Vietnam’s 63 provinces are carrying out the program, which is intended to support economic development in poor areas while protecting forest cover and supplementing state forestry budgets. But they concede that the program, which is mandatory for hydropower companies, is hindered by administrative inefficiencies and does not yet measure the effects on water quality or forest or watershed health.

Some experts now wonder whether the program, officially called Payments for Forest Environmental Services, is environmentally or financially sustainable.

So far, the payments are “not really paying for environmental services — they’re essentially labor contracts,” Pamela McElwee, a professor at Rutgers University who studies environmental policies in Vietnam, said recently in Hanoi. “There’s not any sort of good monitoring, so the hydropower companies are kind of taking it on faith that they’re getting something out of this.”

Under the rules, hydropower companies pay 20 dong per kilowatt-hour — less than one tenth of a cent — into a government fund and pass on the fees to their customers, typically via electricity rates, according to Pham Hong Luong, a forestry official at the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development. The state then distributes the money to communities and companies tasked with protecting forests.

Mr. Luong said in an interview that the national program generated about $47 million a year. A handful of tourism and water-supply companies participate, he added, but 98 percent of the payments come from hydropower producers.

 

The payments program is the latest in a series of forestry reforms in Vietnam since the late 1980s, when the ruling Communist Party gradually began to introduce market-based changes across its government-dominated economy. Environmental experts say the concept of ecosystem payments began to take hold in the early 2000s, when the government viewed them as a budgetary replacement of sorts for state-financed reforestation programs that were scheduled to expire.

The program has since received financing from many international donors, including $10 million since 2005 from the United States Agency for International Development.

An ecosystem payment program is “different from other conservation approaches in that it intends to apply a more marketlike approach,” Joakim Parker, the Vietnam mission director for the United States agency, said in a written response to questions. He said that some hydropower companies were assessing whether the program helped reduce sediment in reservoirs and that it would be a long-term process.

 

But Mr. Luong of the agriculture ministry said forestry officials struggled to collect from many small and midsize hydropower companies. All such companies in the country have contracts with Vietnam Electricity, or E.V.N., the state power distribution monopoly. But Mr. Luong said the company often refused to renegotiate long-term electricity-buying agreements, and hydropower companies said they could not manage the extra expenses.

“It’s very difficult for them to pay us if E.V.N. cannot pay them,” he said in an interview.

Representatives for four hydropower companies in Vietnam that participate in the payments program either could not be reached by telephone or declined to comment.

Even if more of those companies eventually participate, environmental experts say, ecosystem payments will not eliminate the financial incentive for poor farmers to log or illegally plant coffee trees in state forests.

In the Central Highlands province of Lam Dong, a household typically earns the equivalent of $15 per 2.5 acres per year from the payments, while the same acreage of coffee yields more than $2,000, according to Pham Thanh Nam, a forestry officer there who coordinated the program’s pilot stage before the 2010 decree.

“If we think of the opportunity cost, it cannot compare with the coffee,” Mr. Nam said during an interview in the city of Da Lat, the provincial capital of Lam Dong. Scholars write that poor members of ethnic minority groups in the Central Highlands are often pushed off their land by settlers from the Kinh ethnic majority group, prompting them to cut trees and grow crops in some of Vietnam’s most resource-rich forests.

As for concerns about the program’s environmental sustainability, Mr. Luong said the government was working with experts from the Asian Development Bank to introduce state-of-the-art technologies, like satellite monitoring to monitor forests.

But Pham Thu Thuy, Vietnam country director at the Center for International Forestry Research, said the program’s environmental monitoring capabilities were still at an “infant stage.”

 

Ms. Thuy and other experts also question whether the program is supporting the poor as intended. She said that in some areas of rural Vietnam, villagers might not trust the leader who signed the contract on the village’s behalf. In other cases, villagers also wanted to invest the money they received into farming, Ms. Thuy added, and so resented a clause that required them to spend a percentage on items that benefited the community, like furniture for a village community center.

Meine van Noordwijk, chief science adviser at the World Agroforestry Center, said the Vietnam program’s shortcomings were not unique..

He said several countries, including China and Costa Rica, have tried to regulate a wide range of ecosystem payments, but none have achieved perfect success because putting price tags on ecosystems is such a complex undertaking: “The challenge is that the definition is setting up a target that is almost unreachable.”

A few Central Highlands villagers said Vietnam’s program, though not perfect, made sense for them.

In the village of Diom A, Touneh Duy, a farmer from the Churu ethnic minority group, has fallen on hard times after a stint in the Vietnamese Army. He said the $113 he received every three months from the program in exchange for protecting state forest land was his primary source of income.

Protecting the government’s woods from loggers and rogue coffee planters can be dangerous, Mr. Duy, 45, said recently at the general store in Diom A. But he was willing to take his chances.

“This program supports poor people,” he said. “I’m one of them.”

 

 

 

ที่มา http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/07/business/international/in-vietnam-paying-communities-to-preserve-the-forests.html?_r=0#