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Nature Conservation Through
Poverty Alleviation:
China's Cao Hai Nature Reserve
Word
quickly spread, and by midnight almost a quarter of the villagers were
surrounding their leader’s home demanding to know why they didn’t receive
the money that some of their neighbors did.
The crowd continued to swell, becoming angrier and more vocal.
To seek help in this village of seven hundred and fifty, without any
roads, electricity, or phone service, village leader Jiang Wen hurriedly left
his house and made the thirty-minute trek to the nature reserve headquarters.
This episode may sound like disaster, but it actually was a positive turn of
events. Jiang Wen, who might have joined the crowd just a few months earlier,
was now taking a bold step and joining forces with the Cao Hai Nature Reserve in
a new venture to protect one of the most important wetlands for migratory
waterfowl in southern China.
China is endowed with tremendous biodiversity, having some of the richest flora and fauna in the world. In addition to the sheer number of species, China is home to many endemic and rare species such as the giant panda, black-necked crane, ginkgo, and dawn redwood. However, with the world’s third largest economy and over one-fifth of the world’s population, maintaining biological diversity is truly a herculean task. Nevertheless, an ambitious effort is under way with an extensive system of over seven hundred nature reserves established throughout the country. Although many traditional problems such as pollution and poaching are found in these reserves, one of the most pressing issues is the poverty of the local inhabitants, which forces them to disregard rules and indiscriminately encroach upon the reserves. As a result, the reserves are deteriorating.
The Cao Hai Nature Reserve lies in China’s southwestern Guizhou Province, atop the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau at two thousand one hundred and seventy meters above sea level. Cao Hai (sea of grass) is named after its abundant wetland vegetation and consists of a small lake, associated wetlands, and a watershed totaling ninety-eight square kilometers. It is an internationally important winter home for more than seventy thousand waterbirds including approximately four hundred endangered black-necked cranes (Grus nigricollis), up to a thousand Eurasian cranes (G. grus), and thousands of bar-headed geese (Anser inicus).
It is here, at Cao Hai, that I worked for the Guizhou Environmental Protection Bureau and the International Crane Foundation on a nature conservation project in 1993 and 1994. My first impression of the situation at Cao Hai was simple: a classic case of intensive use of resources leading to extensive degradation. The solution: rehabilitate the reserve by keeping people away from its key areas. However, after a few weeks on the job I realized that this strategy had already been tried repeatedly, resulting only in failure and a deepening resentment of the reserve by local villagers. My reserve-staff colleague and friend, Huang Mingjie, explained to me that poverty was the main reason for failure. In 1993, the twelve villages located inside the reserve were some of the poorest in China, with an annual per capita income of under forty dollars. Many families were hard-pressed to grow enough food to survive the winter. Due to these conditions, the population was forced to use and abuse the resources around them, often putting people in direct competition with the birds and causing severe ecological damage.
Food
Source vs. Conservation
The villagers knew that their actions could be detrimental in the long run. In 1971, people were so desperate for food that the regional government spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to drain the Cao Hai lake in hopes of increasing crop production. At the same time, villagers removed trees from the surrounding hills in an attempt to increase cropland and pasture-land. The results were dismal: there was a loss of fish protein; most of the lake bottom was found useless for crops due to exposed bedrock and inappropriate soils; local weather patterns changed dramatically; soil erosion increased along the hillsides; pests ravaged what crops did grow; and ground water levels dropped to such a degree that it was difficult to find drinking water. Not only did the local population suffer, but the migratory birds vanished. These unforeseen troubles so shocked the people that in 1982 the provincial government built a dam to restore the lake. Unexpectedly, but fortuitously, many of the birds returned. So many returned that in 1985 Cao Hai became a nature reserve.
Unfortunately, even with the re-establishment of the lake and its wetlands, and the designation of a nature reserve with an extensive headquarters and a staff of twenty, problems persisted. The uplands continued to deteriorate as crop yields decreased, grasses thinned, and rain tore gullies in the hillsides. Lake resources were degraded from overuse. In only a few decades, the total fish catch per year declined from over one hundred and fifty thousand kilograms to less than twenty thousand. Even though the villagers knew that destroying wetlands, overfishing the lake, and overgrazing the hillsides were detrimental to their own well being, they could not afford to let the resources rest. With problems in just getting enough food, farmers created marginal cropland by destroying wetlands, which forced hungry birds to feed directly on farmers’ fields. Crop damage intensified conflict. In response, the reserve raised the lake levels to flood some of the reclaimed farmland. This action put some distance between the farmers and the birds and stabilized the wetlands at a level sufficient for the tens of thousands of birds in the reserve. But resentment toward the reserve intensified. Relations grew acrimonious, and the villagers angrily demanded compensation from the reserve.
Imagine not being able to grow enough food to make it through the winter, and then being asked not to fish because the birds need the fish. The farmers had had enough. One day when the reserve staff came to Yangguanshan village to destroy the illegal fishing nets, the farmers appeared with knives and hoes in their hands and chased reserve staff out of their village. The reserve staff was so taken aback that they soon realized that in order to accomplish any long-term protection for the birds, their efforts must focus on the local people as well as the birds. In 1993, the Cao Hai Nature Reserve joined forces with the Guizhou Environmental Protection Bureau, the International Crane Foundation from Wisconsin, and the New York-based Trickle- Up Program to alter its approach to managing the reserve. Their new approach placed priority on improving the lives of those most adversely affected by nature protection. The project helped them use the resources in the reserve, along with alternative resources, through an innovative micro-lending program.
This new venture attempted to change two key relations—those between the reserve and the local people, and the relation between the people and the land. Instead of following a narrow, bird-oriented mission, reserve leader Chen Zhende and his staff saw their task as guiding the local people in economic development in a way that would heal the damaged land while raising family incomes. Through this process, the local people would see the reserve as helpful. If the economic development was sustainable, the project would also reduce the detrimental pressure on the land and help the birds survive. Because the villagers were the chief custodians of Cao Hai’s waters and hills, the new project attempted to empower them by giving the villagers the knowledge and means to pursue ecologically sound alternatives to development.
Experiments
in Democracy
The crucial first step of the reserve’s new initiative involved establishing small enterprises through the Trickle-Up Program (TUP) methodology, which provides conditional grants of one hundred dollars to groups of three or more people, usually families. These groups then develop their own businesses. To receive the first payment of fifty dollars, each group prepared a business plan and agreed to invest at least one thousand hours of labor over the next three months. They also agreed to reinvest at least twenty percent of the business profits. After three months, provided the grant conditions had been met, the groups received a second fifty dollars to invest in their businesses. In addition, and perhaps most important, the business activities had to be compatible with the conservation needs of Cao Hai. For example, raising pigs was acceptable but raising ducks was not. Domestic ducks competed with wild birds for food resources and could have exposed them to diseases. The Trickle-Up Program had successfully followed this strategy in self-help poverty alleviation in one hundred and seventeen countries. Cao Hai, however, was the first place where TUP has linked poverty alleviation with environmental conservation.
Although there are over twenty thousand poor farmers living within the reserve, all potential participants, the project started cautiously with only sixty people in twelve groups. After a year, eleven of the groups were successful, with only one group opting instead to use the money for food and alcohol. Despite some minor problems, the project was ready to expand to over four hundred groups, with twenty new groups starting every few months.
The TUP process focuses only on the poorest of the poor, but in order to alter the detrimental activities of other villagers, it was necessary to develop a program for the rest of the local inhabitants. In villages most affected by conservation measures, community trust funds were established in addition to the TUP businesses. To reduce possible resentment by villagers not receiving TUP money, each TUP group donates twenty-five dollars to a trust from its second TUP payment, matched by thirty-three dollars from the Chinese government and one hundred dollars from the International Crane Foundation. The villagers control their own trust fund. They decide how the money will be managed, as long as the resulting activities are not in conflict with conservation priorities. In fact, villagers try to incorporate conservation activity such as planting trees. To date, each village with a trust has set up a revolving loan fund. User groups (those borrowing money) range in size from ten to one hundred and twenty-nine families, and follow the rules and procedures established by the villagers themselves. The reserve staff, while not controlling the trust funds, monitors them to insure that only conservation-friendly projects are undertaken. They also spend extensive time providing technical assistance to the villagers on their development projects. Between 1993 and 2000 over five hundred families have started TUP businesses, eighty percent of which are still functioning, and more than fifteen hundred families have access to sixty-five trust funds.
Change is often traumatic. Change can be confusing. Yet change can be wonderfully surprising. In the past, when the government gave money or food to a village, the leader would divide it evenly among all of the residents, who would use it primarily for basic necessities. But with this project, only the poorest residents were eligible for the TUP money, while everybody was eligible for money from the trust. When the TUP project expanded into the villages, those not receiving the TUP money became very angry. A lack of understanding by the international organizations about how money was distributed in the past, and the lack of communication by the reserve and the village leader, led to the angry mob outside of Jiang’s home. However, once the project was fully explained to all villagers— which took tremendous energy because of the complexity of the project and the great deviation from the past—the international organizations and reserve staff were warmly accepted. To help with communication and to minimize episodes like the one at the leader’s home, the reserve staff has spent extensive time in the villages trying to understand problems from the perspective of the farmers, helping the villagers evaluate their own needs and abilities, and helping everyone to comprehend the TUP and the trust-fund processes. This approach is a dramatic departure from the past—when officials dictated rules to the villagers—and has taken time and patience to achieve.
Sitting on stools around a coal stove in village-leader Jiang’s home, reserve staff discussed their changing perspective on the nature reserve with the villagers. Jiang’s house is about four hundred square-feet in size, and the coal stove cooks food, boils water for tea, and heats the stone house all at the same time. Next to the main room are a couple of bedrooms and a pigpen for Jiang’s five pigs. As they sipped their tea and smoked their cigarettes, the staff explained how they initially viewed the reserve as theirs, and that their single mission was to protect the birds from the farmers. Once they were forced to see the reserve from the farmers’ perspective, they realized why the farmers had hated them. Now, with the reserve’s new focus on people as well as birds, the farmers have begun to see the staff as providing them assistance, and the staff see the farmers as partners in conservation.
As the new initiative expanded, reserve-staff members encouraged people to branch into new areas of business, to think widely about what they might do, and to consider what help they need in order to do it. Some groups expanded the work that they were already involved in, but most came up with completely new businesses such as stove construction, tofu making, sugar production, eco-tourism, potato processing, and food transportation—all ventures that have been extremely successful. The tofu-making project is one that exemplifies one of the main goals of steering people away from resource-depleting activity and towards alternative strategies. The Miao family used the grant money to grow beans and purchase tofu-making equipment. The beans are used to make the tofu, which is sold weekly for short-term profit, while the bean waste is fed to pigs that bring in a long-term profit. The pig manure is also used to fertilize the bean crops. The Trickle-Up Program profits have made a major difference for the villagers: the average profit for a sample of three hundred and seventy-eight TUP groups was seventy-nine dollars.
A good example of the integration of poverty alleviation with nature conservation can be seen in the village of Bojiwan, where a handful of brick houses with tile roofs are scattered among the trees lining a hillside at the edge of one of the most important wetlands for migratory birds. The farmers were eager to participate in the TUP businesses and in the community trust-fund project, but they were skeptical about conservation aspects of the project. In 1999, reserve officials began working with the farmers of Bojiwan to help them identify their development needs and the conservation needs of the reserve. In May of 1999, the villagers conducted their first vote to identify their priorities. Each participant received six kernels of corn and was asked to place three kernels beside what they felt was their top priority, two beside the second priority, and one next to the third priority. The top votes went to improving the village road (thirty-five kernels), improving the water supply (twenty-six), creating a special bird conservation area (eighteen), and tree planting (thirteen). Since that time, the International Crane Foundation has assisted in road improvements, the Guizhou Environmental Protection Bureau has assisted in the development of the bird protection area, and Oxfam International has donated funds for the construction of a bird-watching tower for tourists. The villagers now realize the value in protecting the birds because of the influx of Chinese tourists, who are willing to pay to view the birds.
The Cao Hai process has been unusual for the high degree of involvement of villagers in decision-making. This involvement is at least partially responsible for the transformation of relations between the reserve and the villagers, and between the villagers and the land. A partnership has developed in the protection of Cao Hai. It is common to see villagers and staff working together on development and conservation projects. The villagers also are showing a new appreciation for the land, albeit slowly. While some villagers continue clearing parts of the meager forestland and over fishing the lake, many others are now planting trees on the hillsides and around their homes. Having given up fishing, many villagers are now seeking alternative ways to living on the land. They now see the wetlands as a tourist attraction for the increasing numbers of city dwellers who come there for relaxation. In fact, a number of TUP businesses have been successful in using small boats to give tours of the wetlands. The annual return of the migratory birds is no longer viewed as an unwanted intrusion, but as a welcomed event. The reserve-staff members’ priority is to help villagers attain a better life. Together the staff and villagers have transformed their relationship to one that promotes the complementary goals of poverty alleviation and conservation. The project has been so successful that it has received national recognition and has become a training ground for conservation managers from all over China. As other reserves in China begin a similar process of conservation through poverty alleviation, they look to Cao Hai as a model for the human side of conservation.
Supporters
of the conservation work at Cao Hai:
Cao Hai Nature Reserve, Guizhou China
Cracid Breeding and Conservation Center
Guizhou Environmental Protection Bureau
Guizhou Provincial Government
International Crane Foundation
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
Keidanren Nature Conservation Fund
Liz Claiborne and Art Ortenberg Foundation
State Environmental Protection Administration
United States Department of State
Stephen S. Young is an associate professor of geography at Salem State College where he teaches courses in environmental geography. Before joining the faculty in 1995, he lived in southwestern China where he worked on a number of conservation projects. Cao Hai Nature Reserve, the Guizhou Environmental Protection Bureau, and the International Crane Foundation deserve thanks for their assistance.
Jim Harris, Director of the International Crane Foundation, who assisted in the preparation of this article, deserves a special thanks.