China’s Grain for Green Program: A Review of the Largest Ecological Restoration and Rural Development Program in the World
By Claudio O. Delang and Zhen Yuan Springer, 2015 Chapter 1
The first chapter discusses the forest policies from 1949 to 1998. In China forests were (and often still are) seen largely as uncultivated farmland. Until 1949 there was not even a Ministry of Forestry, with the forests being managed by the Ministry of Agriculture. The communist government did try to use forests more rationally, by instituting the first national-level Ministry of Forestry (MOF). However, the MOF was not able to manage the forests sustainably, being understaffed and with insufficient funds to replant the trees that had been cut. The objectives of forest management were basically to help promote the development of the country: from 1949 to 1998, the role of timber was to produce cheap raw material and fuel for the national drive towards industrialization, and the role of forestland was to provide agricultural land to feed the burgeoning population. In particular the Great Leap Forward resulted in great deforestation, as farmers cut large amounts of timber to aliment furnaces to melt pig iron, and as forests were cut to increase the amount of farmland. Deforestation also continued during the Cultural Revolution, when the government (including the MOF) was scaled down, much of its staff removed, and the feeble attempts to control deforestation were further weakened. After 1978 there have been a number of reforms, including the Resolution on Issues Concerning Forest Protection and Development in March 1981, popularly known as the “Three Fixes”, and the Forest Law of 1984. These helped improve the situation, but did not stop deforestation from continuing.
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