Rubber Trees For Tyre Industry Shrink China Rainforests

On a map on ecologist Liu Wenjie’s computer, the subtropical southern tip of China’s Yunnan province is slowly turning from green to red.

Rubber plantations — shown in red on Liu’s computer screen — have supplanted nearly all the low-lying forest in the prefecture of Xishuangbanna and are now starting to encroach on the highlands.
Liu and other scientists are worried that the expansion of rubber plantations to feed China’s voracious tyre industry, the world’s largest, will destroy the ecosystem of Xishuangbanna. The province is home to China’s richest variety of flora and fauna.

Three decades ago, jungles and high mountain forests covered about 70 percent of Xishuangbanna, tucked between China’s borders with Laos and Myanmar. By 2003, that proportion had shrunk to less than 50 percent.

“With rubber prices rising like crazy, any tree that can be cut down has been cut down to make way for rubber,” said Liu, a professor at the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, run by the Chinese Academy of Science.

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