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#
