(Opposite) Rattan (Daemonorops jenkinsiana) stem with fruits, Central Truong Son Mountains, Vietnam.
Communities and forests within the Greater Mekong Region of Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam; six nature reserves within the Truong Son Mountains of Vietnam, 2009–2014
Rattans are spiny, climbing palms that grow throughout the Old World (Africa, Asia, and Australia) tropics. There are currently over five hundred different species of rattan known, and the number continues to grow as more botanical collections are made. Rattan palms are used for a variety of subsistence purposes—cordage, basketry, food, medicine, and thatch—and the flexible stems, or canes, provide the raw material for a multi-billion-dollar international furniture industry. Almost all of this material is harvested from wild populations. Several million people use, collect, and sell rattan, or are involved in some way with the international rattan trade. Rattan is, without question, one of the most important non-timber forest products in the world.
Over the past fifteen years, I have studied rattan in a number of different countries and contexts.1 Much of this work was done in collaboration with a palm systematist, Andrew Henderson, who was extremely skillful at identifying both named species and new species when we happened to find them. In each of these projects we have been confronted by a similar set of difficult conditions.
Local names for rattans vary considerably, and the exact taxonomic identity of many commercial species is still in doubt. It is discouraging not to know the Latin name of a rattan that generates millions of dollars in foreign exchange to a country each year. In addition, almost no information is available about the density and conservation status of wild rattan populations. We have been told that “rattan stocks are dwindling,” but we know virtually nothing about the population densities of wild rattan, or whether these populations are regenerating, or which species are most resilient—or most susceptible—to the impacts of repeated harvesting. Finally, most of the rattan cane is harvested in an uncontrolled manner. Harvest quotas, when they exist, are based more on the current demand for the resource than on the supply of cane; consciously managing wild rattan populations, although occasionally discussed, is rarely implemented.
Andrew Henderson and I first started to engage directly with the management of wild rattan populations in six protected areas in the Central Truong Son Mountains of Vietnam. Vietnam is the third-largest producer of rattan cane in the world—about one out of every six canes sold worldwide comes from Vietnam—but much of this material is collected illegally from local nature reserves. Our work in Vietnam subsequently expanded into Laos and Cambodia, where rattan is harvested commercially from community forests. The rattan species and forest habitats we encountered were similar throughout the region, whereas the accessibility of the rattan resource, the expertise of local collecting groups, and the motivation to manage rattan on a sustainable basis varied from country to country. By the end of our project, hundreds of communities in the Greater Mekong had invested in managing their rattan, and a well-known international furniture retailer was buying the annual harvest.
Much of the rattan coming out of Vietnam is collected from a network of protected areas in the Central Truong Son Mountains. This region contains the highest density of commercially valuable rattan species in the country—as well as the highest concentration of rattan collectors. The terrain in these protected areas is rugged and mountainous, traversed by the Ho Chi Minh trail (which is actually a network of trails linking Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos that was used as a major supply route by the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War). Fifty years ago, American and South Vietnamese forces relentlessly bombed and napalmed these forests to interrupt the flow of supplies along the trail. Rattan, however, adapts well to disturbance (to put it mildly) and high light levels, such as were created by the bombs’ thinning of the trees, and today the forests of the Central Truong Son produce several million dollars’ worth of rattan cane each year.
But at the time we began our project, rattan collectors were not supposed to be going into the nature reserves, especially the core zones of the nature reserves, to collect rattan. Their doing so represented a dilemma for the local Forestry Department. On one hand, rattan collecting generated sizable revenues and offered employment to thousands of villagers. On the other, the creation of these nature reserves was facilitated by generous donations from several international foundations and conservation organizations, and these groups had started to strongly request that rattan collectors be kept out of the reserve. My contribution was the suggestion that rattan, like any other forest resource, could be managed in such a way that it would not be depleted. While the rattan in the core zone should probably still be protected, communities could be allowed to harvest it in the buffer zone if they did so sustainably. It was suggested that there might be some legal precedent in the Forestry Law to allow communities to do this, but no one had ever made the attempt.
My initial questions concerning the species and quantities and growth rates of rattan found in the nature reserves went unanswered. At that time, the situation of the rattan in the Central Truong Son Mountains could best be characterized as an extreme example of a valuable forest resource of questionable taxonomic identity being exploited in an uncontrolled fashion until supplies were completely depleted. We contacted the directors of six nature reserves—Bac Huong Hoa and Dakrong in Quang Tri Province; Phong Dien and Sao La in Thua Thien Hue Province; Song Thanh in Quang Nam Province; and Ngoc Linh in Kon Tum Province—to put a project together.
The aim of the project was to train the forestry staff at each reserve to identify the local rattans and run a simple inventory transect. We would then provide financial support to enable two field crews in each reserve to identify, count, and measure wild rattan plants. By analyzing these data, we could learn which rattan species grew in each reserve, at what densities they occurred, and whether their populations were regenerating in the forest. We could then select the best species to manage, initiate growth studies, make a few yield predictions, and start talking to communities about legally harvesting rattan in the reserve.
Representatives from all six nature reserves attended a three-day planning workshop. We provided the participants with a draft field guide in Vietnamese, with pictures of the leaves, stems, and reproductive structures of each of the rattan species that we thought they would encounter in the inventories. The pages were laminated so the guides could be used in the field. If crews found rattans that were not listed in the field guide, they were instructed to make a collection and take copious notes on the plant. By having teams from different reserves looking at the same species, we hoped to come up with a more or less standardized local nomenclature. There are over thirty different common names for rattan in Vietnam, and the same name is used to refer to different species in different places. We did our best to ensure that our teams called the plants by the same name.
We explained the inventory methodology, showed everyone how to use the equipment—a twenty-meter transect rope with knots to correct for slope, a compass, a clinometer for measuring slope and rattan heights, and a GPS device—and spent several days in the forest running inventory transects. We experienced days when we tallied only a few rattan species, days when we tallied a dozen, days when the topography was so steep that we had to stop because it was too dangerous, and one day when everyone got covered in leeches. We spent the last day of the workshop devising a system for locating the transects that would ensure that every part of the reserve was sampled, instead of all the transects running a short distance down the road from the park headquarters. We divided each reserve into four concentric bands with the park headquarters in the center, and the field crews were asked to randomly locate a certain number of transects in each band. We reached a consensus about the number of transects, the per diem rate, and the time allocated to complete the fieldwork, and the teams were given a contract for the director to sign. Each reserve agreed to sample 160 transects and complete the work in six months. We had a delightful farewell dinner together, and I went back to Hanoi and got a plane to New York.
In spite of conscientious training, enthusiastic participants, and signed contracts, we can never be sure that everything in a project will work out as planned. We had a capable and well-connected local project coordinator and a forest resource worth millions of dollars. All the reserves had a strong incentive to complete the inventories—but even with these advantages things can go wrong. Eight months went by. Then one day our project coordinator showed up with fifteen orange field books filled with inventory data. In spite of rain and a continual series of operational difficulties, the rangers and field assistants at the six reserves had completed 960 transects and counted, measured, identified, and spatially referenced 175,295 rattan plants in the Central Truong Son Mountains, the largest rattan inventory ever conducted. Impressive as these statistics are, that the Truong Son rattan inventories merit this distinction goes a long way to explain the current pattern of resource depletion characterizing the international rattan trade. If less than two hundred hectares is the largest quantitative assessment ever made of a multibillion-dollar wild-harvested commodity, an enormous amount of work clearly needs to be done in this sector.
Discovering the names and quantities of the different rattans in a forest is only the first step in a sustainable-use equation. The number of harvestable canes that exist in the forest at a particular moment in time can be thought of as the stock of the rattan resource. But this rattan cannot all be harvested each year; harvesting the entire stock of a plant species is how resources become overexploited and ultimately depleted. Most important for the sustainable harvest of rattan is gauging the annual yield of the resource—the quantity of new cane, or growth, that is produced each year by the stock. This quantity represents the limit of how much rattan can be harvested from the forest each year. Unless the managers understand the growth characteristics of a wild-harvested resource, they cannot put a program for sustainable harvesting in place, or set harvest quotas, or make financial projections, or do economic planning. When we started our project, no data were available on the growth of wild rattans in Vietnam.
Based on the inventory results, we started growth studies on the three most important commercial rattan species in five of the nature reserves. In each reserve, field crews selected three hundred individuals of varying size from each species, estimated the height of the rattan, and marked the last leaf and bud on the stem with bright orange spray paint. Spray painting the last leaf and bud on a ten-meter-tall spiny rattan plant can be extremely difficult, not to say prickly. The crews frequently constructed rustic ladders in the field if they were unable to climb a neighboring tree. Twelve months later, the sample plants were revisited, and the distance between the orange paint and the end of the new, green stem tissue that was produced was measured to estimate the rate of annual growth. Each reserve marked and followed the growth of 900 rattan plants, providing a total sample size of 4,500 individuals. We went from no growth data to a great deal of growth data for six commercial rattan species in one year.
We learned many useful things from the growth studies—for example, that growth rate is a function of size. Tall rattans grow two to three times faster than small rattans. We also learned that the growth rates for most species were well over a meter per year, and that some species were growing in excess of two meters per year. Perhaps one of the most important things we learned, however, especially in terms of promoting the collection of further data on rattan growth in other countries, is that a reasonable estimate of rattan growth can be obtained with a sample size of about 120 sample plants per species—less than half the 300 plants that we originally marked.2 In terms of logistics, a small field crew could collect the growth data needed to define a sustainable harvest of a commercial rattan species in two days.
We held a final management-planning workshop using the inventory and growth data. Members of the technical staff from each reserve attended, as well as the directors of two of the reserves and the vice director of a third. All showed much interest in managing rattan, and with the presence of three directors, who collectively control the activities in over 175,000 hectares of forest in central Vietnam, everyone listened carefully, asked good questions, and took copious notes. Two of our take-home points seemed to resonate most strongly with the workshop participants, that it is impossible to sustainably harvest from the forest in one year more than is produced in that time period, and that carefully collected inventory and growth data—which they now had—could be combined to provide an estimate of the total annual growth of rattan in a forest. It was generally agreed that these principles could be usefully applied within the buffer zone habitats of protected areas in Vietnam.3
At the same time we were looking at the supply side of the rattan resource in Vietnam, a large international conservation organization had started a project in Laos and Cambodia that was focused on the demand issues—processing technologies, market development, supply chains—of the local rattan sector. I met the director of this project, Thibault Ledecq, currently the regional forest coordinator for the World Wildlife Fund’s Greater Mekong Program, a delightful Belgian with more than a decade of experience in Laos. Ledecq described what his rattan project was doing, I told him what our project was doing, and we both quickly agreed that we should combine forces and start working together.
I went to Laos and Cambodia several times and gave training workshops to his staff about forest inventories and sustainable resource management, while Andrew Henderson made a few trips to collect rattans and work with local palm researchers. I made site visits to participating communities in Laos and Cambodia to review their field operations and answer questions, and began collaboration on a growth study that had been initiated the year before involving several commercial species.4 During the workshops and site visits, we talked extensively about rattan taxonomy, forest inventories, yield studies, community management planning, and the biological bases of sustainable resource use. We discovered new species and adapted the data collection methodologies developed in the protected areas of Vietnam for use in community forests.5 We helped the teams simplify and streamline their procedures and disseminated the protocols to villages interested in managing their rattan resources. Despite a few logistical problems and conceptual difficulties, by the end of 2013, forty villages in Laos, thirty villages in Vietnam, and twenty villages in Cambodia had started managing their rattan resources using inventory and growth data that they had collected themselves.
The world’s largest furniture retailer, IKEA, located in Sweden, sells a lot of rattan furniture. In an effort to make its supply chain more sustainable, IKEA had been supporting the conservation organization’s demand-side rattan project in Laos and Cambodia for several years. We thought the company might also be interested in supporting our new rattan collaboration, which was addressing both the demand and the supply side of the issue, which ideally should be considered together. Increasing the supply of a resource when there is no demand is bad business; increasing demand without first making sure of the supply leads to resource depletion. The company was receptive to the idea, and started funding the work. IKEA also agreed to purchase a specified quantity of sustainably produced rattan cane from villages participating with the project.
One of the major outputs of the collaboration was a field guide to the systematics, ecology, and community management of the sixty-five species of rattan that grow in the Greater Mekong Region.6 This guide was one of the first of its kind. Field guides to selected groups of plants, monographs about plant ecology, and textbooks of forest management have been available for years, but rarely have the three disciplines been brought together in a single volume, especially one focused on a non-timber forest resource that offers simple management protocols.
During my last site visit to Laos, we designed a monitoring system for assessing harvest impacts and the long-term viability of forest management. Such is the basic workflow. The crews collect the baseline data, define a sustainable harvest level, harvest the resource, and then monitor what happens, adjusting harvest levels as necessary. In 2011, the rattan forests of four villages in the Bolikhamxay Province of Laos were certified sustainable.7
Our projects in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia have provided useful examples of how rattan can be exploited on a sustained-yield basis, both in community forests and the buffer zones of protected areas. Harvesting wild rattan based on quantitative inventories and growth data, according to the productive capacity of each population, is clearly a major improvement over uncontrolled exploitation, and we have demonstrated how, with a little training, these basic data can be collected by villagers or forest rangers. It is not too expensive or time-consuming to manage rattan stocks, and now that we know the names of all the local species and have reliable estimates of the annual growth of several commercial ones, we hope that more communities and forest wardens in the Greater Mekong Region will consider investing in the long-term benefits of sustainable resource use.