Rubber trees for tire industry shrink China rainforests

By Rujun Shen

XISHUANGBANNA, China (Reuters) - 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 tire 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.

Rainforests have been reduced to patches of protected zones in Xishuangbanna, one of the top rubber producing regions in China, as double-digit economic growth has caused increasing encroachment on China's last remnants of uncultivated land.

The official figure for Yunnan Province's rubber acreage is 334,000 hectares, about 43 percent of the country's total acreage, but the real figure may be much higher.

China consumed 2.35 million tonnes of natural rubber in 2007. About 70 percent of that was imported from abroad, mainly from Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, Southeast Asian countries that are also facing deforestation from expanding rubber plantations.