South China Morning Post
March 7, 2006

The China Yangtze Three Gorges Project Development Corporation announced this year it would build two giant dams on the Golden Sands River, which it says are urgently needed to trap sediment that would otherwise flow into the Three Gorges reservoir.

A national ban on logging announced three years ago is not working, according to mainland experts who also fear forests in neighbouring countries are being targeted to feed China’s appetite for timber. “People ignore the government prohibitions. They are driven by greed,” said Zhao Junchen, of the Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences. Mr Zhao is studying the impact of the logging ban on Yunnan. He pointed to the arrest of Communist Party leaders of Gongshan county, bordering Tibet, on charges of illegally logging natural forests. The ban was announced by Premier Zhu Rongji after the devastating 1998 Yangtze floods. The move has not stopped private companies approaching villages that collectively own 70 per cent of Yunnan’s forest reserves. Local government officials in poor mountainous areas say that without the logging income, they cannot pay their own salaries. “We used to get 20 per cent of the budget from logging. Now we rely on government subsidies for 100 per cent of our budget,” said Zhang Youmin, former head of the local logging company in Deqin county. A new World Bank report entitled “China: Air, Land and Water” warns of the worsening situation. “China’s natural forests have been in a continuous state of decline for 50 years and there are no signs that the corner on sustainable management of natural forests has been turned,” the report says. It points out that despite a major tree-planting effort, China’s state forests suffer from poor management and the absence of a central agency to control natural resources. Experts say state logging companies have turned their energies to the forests of neighbouring countries like Myanmar, Mongolia and Laos