Of forests and <i>Kochu</i> plantation
The forest on the hills of Marissa in Rangamati has been wiped out while arum is planted on forestland at Ramgarh in Khagrachhari as the forest department officials encourage such cultivation. Photo: Syed Zakir Hossain
The arum (Kochu) plantation says it all. Or the new settlement a little away from the BDR camp in Marissa. Or the hills themselves. The story they tell is the same--it is one of mass scale destruction of forests in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT). It could as well be called a genocide of trees.
As our car entered Khagrachhari, the scenes hit us in the face. Whichever direction you look all you see is denuded hills, shaven clean of everything, like systematic ethnic cleansing. As if somebody was hell-bent on not leaving anything standing there.
In the dull monsoon light, the hills reminded us of shaven heads. Some hills are still to be cropped. But they will be soon as the work of the approaching loggers was visible. Some hills are half denuded; the rest waiting for the killers.
Then we saw the arum plantation on a strip of a hill. A forest department staff was supervising the long patch of plants that we eat as vegetables. Where tall trees were supposed to exist in the reserved forest, one-foot tall deep green arum plants sway in the breeze. And we found similar plantations elsewhere in the CHT in the next few days as Dr Reza Khan, member of the World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA), took us around to show the devastation in the hills. We were appalled. But not the forest department that is supposed to protect the trees.
“This is the best land for arum,” boasted a forest official in Rangamati when we asked him the reason for such ignorance of his office. “It brings in huge revenue. We should encourage such practices along with banana and pineapple cultivation.”
But where are the trees? Where are the forests? And where are the animals and birds and butterflies that are supposed to live there?
“Nothing is left. Absolutely nothing,” he said. “All cut down by the Bangalees and the hills people. When you have no forests you have no animals.”
He avoided talking about the lead role that the forest department took in the systematic devastation of the forests, about the mindless illegal logging with support of the corrupt forest staff, and the unacceptable forest management practices being done there that led to quick depletion of the forest.
But we find them out anyway. As we travelled the two districts--from Khagrachhari town to Massalong to Baghaihat to Baghaichhari to Pablakhali to Mainimukh to Rangamati town--we witnessed how the forest and its wildlife got the least priority in the thinking and actions of the forest department and the government as well.
We found the indigenous people practising the Jhum cultivation on an unsustainable level, cleaning the entire hills. We found the hill people freely squatting on forest land, clearing off prime forests. And the Bangalees have done no lesser damage. Brought here in the 1980s to counter the insurgency threat of the Shanti Bahini, they have freely chopped off trees and turned prime forests into barren land. We found Jhunayet Ali from Rangpur in Pablakhali forest of Rangamati who has squatted in the reserved forest and at least five acres of land around him does not have one single mature tree standing. He even does not feel the loss of trees.
“We have to eat. Standing trees will not give us food,” he said as we pointed to his contribution to the disaster around. “What is the use if we do not use these trees. They are for us.”
We found no forest control over the hills, no patrolling and no monitoring. It is today a free-for-all country. Come and clear away anything you like.
“In fact, the forest department was the main culprit to start off this devastation on the hills,” says Dr Reza Khan. “In the name of rotation cropping, they have introduced a strange kind of forestry. They plant trees for 20 years or even less and then one day they think the trees are long enough to bring in money. They clear off hills after hills and sell the logs.”
“And the forest department often engages the locals to do the job in exchange for a piece of land to cultivate, Dr Khan refers to what we had seen earlier in the day. Right in the middle of the reserved forest, we saw fresh encroachment as patches have been levelled for rice cultivation. We saw numerous such encroachments, old and new, inside the ravines of the hills. Sadly, reserved forests are supposed to be pristine forests, not farmlands.
“The forest department also engages the locals to do their bit of plantation in exchange for farming right,” Dr Khan continues. “And once they get a hand on the forest, they keep pushing on and on until the whole hills are gone.”
But why doesn't the forest department monitor such progress of encroachment? The answer came from a Bagaihat forester.
“What can we do? We cannot visit the hills because we are attacked and kidnapped. We simply do not dare to go there. So, the forests disappear and we have no clue about what's happening there,” he admits to us.
And so as we travelled over 200 kilometres in the two districts of Khagrachhari and Rangamati, we hardly found two dozens of mature trees which are beyond the age of 40. From the distant, the hills look green not because of the existence of any tree but because of the overgrown undergrowth in the monsoon. And whatever trees still stand, they are hardly about 10-15 years old.
“This is a hell disaster for birds and animals,” Dr Khan explains. “They have lost their habitat and so either they migrated to India and Myanmar or simply disappeared. That is what has happened to the white winged wood duck, which needed tall soft wooded trees for nesting. I had seen these ducks in the 1980s. They are no more found here. The same fate is awaiting the hornbills. Even in the 1960s, you could find Bengal Tiger here, the same kind that you find in the Sundarbans today. It disappeared. So are hundred other species of birds and animals. They are gone for ever.”
“First the Bangalees started the killing of the forest as they settled down here and found no other means of livelihood,” Dr Khan explains the deforestation process. “The forest staff joined in by using the settlers to chop off trees in exchange for bribes. And then the hills people put their stakes in the destruction. Today the indigenous people are the main destructors of the forest.”
He recalls what he saw in 1997 soon after the signing of the peace accord with the Shanti Bahini which waged a bush war for more than two decades in the hills.
“It was an eerie sight as I saw hundreds of people chopping trees together all around. Chopping and taking away. Even the frail old women who could barely move were whacking at the trunks with machetes. It was a free take for all and everybody wanted to take away whatever they could. There was literally no checks, no controls, no forest department presence anywhere. It seemed that we were in a godforsaken country,” he says.
And then we come across the strange introduction of alien trees--acacia, eucalyptus and teaks--all around that serve little purpose of having a forest. Miles after miles, the environment destructing acacia and eucalyptus trees are growing. They do not support any wildlife, and no plants and undergrowth can grow around them. They are planted just because they grow quickly and give the hills the phoney look of forests. They come to no other purpose than providing firewood. Still these foreign species are grown by the forest department. Teak that was brought to this country by the British has economic values for its wood, also does not support wildlife. And replacing the local species with foreign varieties has widespread ecological and biodiversity impacts.
But what shocked us the most is the forest department's mindless pruning of the teak. They chopped off the trees and left only the short stumps about four feet high. New branches have sprouted from the stumps, new leaves have sprawled. But that's just about it. These trees have been made bonsais forever.
“They will never grow more than 10 feet or so,” Dr Khan pointed out as we filled up our camera memory cards with hundreds of pictures of hundreds of hill patches where such grotesque practice has been committed. “They will become teak shrubs at best with no economic value at all. This is blue murder.”
On our way to Baghaihat from Massalong, we could see for miles the denuded hills looking like sprawling golf courses. In the monsoon they are capable of attracting acclamations from tourists for their green carpet like looks. But we knew they are the hollowed out souls of the forest that will soon be beyond any hope of rejuvenation because of fast soil erosion. When the tree cover is gone, the rain causes huge soil erosion, leading to landslides we could see all around--the unmistakable signs of red soil exposed after landslides. And we could see that the soil quality is deteriorating fast--when the topsoil is gone, exposed is the unfertile pebble like inner soil where trees will not grow again.
And the erosion is causing another massive problem in the form of siltation. The rivers are being silted up and a little rain leads to flash floods. The Baghaihat people testified how the Kasalong River that flows by this municipality town easily floods over the banks because of siltation. At Pablakhali, we found the ravines that used to be full of water during the monsoon and irrigate the trees are dry now as water is slow to flow. And the biggest victim is the Kaptai hydro dam, which faces closure because of siltation. All the silts from the hills are flushed into the Kaptai Lake.
As trees are gone, the timber business in the hill districts has dipped and faces an uncertain future. At Rangamati, the saw-mill owners said they see a drastic fall in timber flow and quality.
“Whatever timber we get now is half the size of what we used to get before,” said Rashid Hye, a timber trader in Rangamati. “The forests are gone. How can we get good quality wood?”
The very reason that the greedy forest staff, the settlers and the indigenous people started their onslaught on the hill forests is today causing not only the death of timber industry, but the demise of the forests altogether. Soon they would turn into complete sterile mounds of earth that produces nothing but shrubs. Where no animals but the Shaliks and crows live. And who would want a vast swath of land to be lying like that? None. So the developers might swoop on the hills soon, and flatten them down and make way for real estates.
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