Gerong, a Tibetan farmer in the Niangjiuding Village in Deqen County, Southwest China's Yunnan Province, takes his family in search of matsutake every year.

In the late 1990s, the family earned about 1,000 yuan (US$121) from selling the mushroom which is popular in Japan. Today, his family could make about 5,000 to 6,000 yuan (US$605-726) a year.

Other families in the village have also seen their income grow.

All that Gerong and other villagers have achieved so far owes much to an international project that aims at balancing nature conservation and improvement of the lives of the people living in and around the nature reserves.

The success of the pioneering project has persuaded some Chinese legislators to propose to improve the draft of the Nature Reserves Law so it will attain both goals.

Conflicts

Nature and wildlife conservation became an important part in China's economic development soon after the country started reforms and opening up.

At the end of 2003, 1,999 nature reserves of different types and levels had been set up in China, accounting for 14.4 percent of China's total territory.

In the past 50 years, especially since the 1980s, China has witnessed an exponential increase in nature reserves' expansion.

According to World Resources 2002-2004, the proportion of China's nature reserves exceeds the average level of the world, and its growth rate is above that of the world average. "China's nature reserves are mainly located in remote, mountainous and ethnic minority-populated areas," said Zuo Ting, a research fellow of the project from College of Humanities and Development of China Agricultural University, at the International Workshop on the Co-management of Nature Reserves in China.

Most of the people there live in poverty, he said.

Conflicts have arisen between the needs of nature conservation and those of the local people for several reasons, according to Zuo.

For instance, most nature reserves in China were founded after the local villagers had already obtained the land on contracts with the local government.

As the local people became aware of the increasing land value, they found they had obtained insufficient compensation in land expropriation and requisition by nature reserves.

A case in point is the Nuozhadu Nature Reserve in Southwest China's Yunnan Province. About two-thirds of the land in this reserve belonged to local rural collectives.

In East China's Fujian Province, community-owned land accounts for 68.8 per cent of the total area of the nature reserves by the mid 1990s.

"There always exists the competition on resources between nature reserves and surrounding communities," said Zuo.

Take the forest reserves as an example. Farmers living in the nature reserves or in surrounding communities depend heavily on the reserves' resources.

For generations, they have used forest wood for building houses and making furniture and tools; they search the forest to collect firewood and pick herbs for medicine, fodder, weaving and dyestuff and decoration. They also hunt for additional food.

Some farmers near nature reserves make a living by growing crops, logging and picking fruit on the nature reserve land.

Also, due to the rise of tourism industry, many local farmers near the reserves started to be engaged in tourism services, making use of the landscape resources of the nature reserves.

"However, the expansion of nature reserves cuts down the resources available to the local communities," Zuo said.

Most nature reserves in China are for forest and wildlife conservation.

However, the wild animals often go beyond the reserves' boundaries, eating or trampling crops and can threaten the lives of the local people.

Baima Dorje, 62, a Tibetan villager, in Deqen County, said that he and his fellow villagers could understand that they would benefit a lot from protecting the forest and water resources.

However, he complained that more and more wild animals in the reserve were coming into his field and ruined his crops.

"There are no compensation for us at all, simply because we live outside the reserve area," he said.

Co-management

"It has already been well recognized among the world's nature reserve workers that any conservation project may fail in the long run, if the local villagers' participation in the process does not arise from their own will," Wu Yusong, manager of Yunnan Field Office of World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) China.

"Or if the protection is emphasized while neglecting the interest of the local residents," said Wu, whose organizations started to pioneer an international project in Gerong's village three years ago to foster sustainable development of nature reserves while trying to improve the lives of the local people.

According to Wu, the objective of the program was to identify links between poverty and environmental degradation and find ways to break the vicious circle.

"The key word with this international program is co-management," she said.

Some 117 sub-villages are located in or around the Baima Reserves. Tibetans make up 80 percent of the 15,000 residents.

Before 1997, 85 percent of local government's revenue came from the timber industry.

However, commercial logging was banned in this area on the upper reaches of the Yangtze River in 1998 after the disastrous flood at the lower and middle reaches.

The local villagers began to pick and sell matsutake mushrooms for cash.

Matsutake mushrooms are also called "the king of mushrooms" due to their perceived effectiveness in combating tumors and are highly prized in Japan.

However, Gerong and other villagers soon found it increasingly difficult to find the delicacies, even after they used rakes, as the result of over grazing and deep digging.

In April 2001, WWF China called a meeting of representatives from villages to discuss matsutake management. As the topic would affect every family's income, Gerong and others were willing participants.

Through the heated discussions, the villagers themselves suggested that they change matsutake collection methods. They said they would better manage the matsutake collection area and regulate the matsutake market.

Gerong's village established a series of rules for the sustainable use of matsutake, which were enforced by the co-management council made up of villagers and reserve management staff.

Gerong said today his fellow villagers are always able to find matsutake in the mountains. They take care to put back the top soil they disturb, thus protecting the matsutake base and assuring its preservation and reproduction.

"The agreement on resource use is definitely involved in co-management arrangement. The villagers are entitled to certain rights to utilize the natural resources in a sustainable way," Wu Yusong said.

"The principle behind the program is to establish a trustful partnership between the managerial institution and surrounding community," Wu said.

Such a relationship helps bridge the gap between policy shaping and implementation, she said.

(China Daily December 4, 2004)