That didn’t seem to matter. A short time after the forestry officials handed out the little green books, Anjia started seeing more visitors: Next, a trio of slickly dressed men from the nearby city of Ninglang showed up, spinning tales about how those little green books could be sold for cold, hard cash. The village secretary, An Zhashi, was intrigued, particularly by a promised side agreement that would see him paid 50,000 yuan (about $7,500 Canadian, using the average exchange for the past 12 months) to get the whole village on board.
The deal on offer seemed a simple trade: The brokers would lease all 6,701 mu that had been allocated to the village, in exchange for a one-time payment of 130 yuan per mu. A mu is a Chinese unit of land measurement; 15 mu make up one hectare. So the Anjia agreement involved some 447 hectares for a total payment of about $130,000, or about $292 per hectare.
It would be a 50-year lease, and there was no description – or restrictions – in the one-page contract regarding precisely what the brokers, or anyone they sold the lease to, intended to do with the land or its trees.
“The brokers came to us and they persuaded us by saying, ‘The trees are so far from the village, there’s no road up, and that this (privatization of forestland) is a new national policy that we should co-operate with,’ ” Mr. An recalled in an interview at his family home, which has just undergone a renovation that he says was paid for by his share of the proceeds from the forestry transfer. “They persuaded us to sell.”
He grimaces when asked if he and the villagers got a good deal. “We didn’t know that in the future the land would be worth 180 yuan or even 290 yuan (per mu). We sold it too cheap.”
If Mr. An had phoned around to other villages like his in remote corners of China, he might have received some useful warnings. In the thickly forested south of Yunnan province, near China’s border with Myanmar, villagers are still smarting over a series of trades in 2005 that left them with just 30 yuan per mu (about $67 per hectare) and saw vast tracts of remote forests transferred eventually into the hands of Sino-Forest, only to see them wildly increase in value.
And in coastal Guangdong province, the head of another village that sold to Sino-Forest says he’s hoping the company’s troubles will result in the forestland being transferred back to the farmers, so they can try to sell it again – and perhaps get a fairer deal the next time around.
A grand plan for forestry
For more than two decades after Deng Xiaoping introduced the principle of “household responsibility” to the country’s farmlands, China’s forestry industry remained trapped in time. According to the country’s post-revolutionary constitution, the forests were owned by rural collectives. In practice, that meant the government, and for decades it was local bureaucrats who managed – and often mismanaged to the point of exhaustion – the country’s 175 million hectares of forests.
In 2002, Beijing introduced its first major forestry reform, the Rural Land Contracting Law, which transferred the forestry usage rights to individual households for terms of 30 to 70 years. Five years later, another law entrenched that privatization by allowing the usage rights to be extended in perpetuity.
Like nearly all major decisions in China, the decisions were announced by the powerful Central Committee of the Communist Party. “Develop the forestry sector, and bring prosperity to the economies of mountainous regions,” was the instruction that went out in a September 2008 Central Committee missive that would be interpreted down the governing pyramid as encouragement to accelerate the pace of China’s great tree sale.
As usual, the government would later give itself top grades for the effort, despite statistics that showed the urban-rural wealth gap continued to expand rather than shrink. This March, Premier Wen Jiabao – during one of his annual (and heavily scripted) question-and-answer sessions with Chinese Internet users – faced multiple questions about the widening income gap between the increasingly rich urban China and the still desperately poor countryside. He pointed to the forestry reforms as a success story in shrinking that divide.
