lonely-planet-myanmar-burma-11-edition

326ENVIRONMENT & WILDLIFE NATIONAL PARKSCOOKING UP AN ECO SOLUTIONDawn over a Myanmar village: the mist you see is not the evaporation of dew, but thesmoke from firewood- and charcoal-fuelled cooking stoves. According to Win Myo Thu,founder of the Myanmar NGO Ecodev (www.ecodev-mm.com), 90 per cent of Myanmar’spopulation relies on firewood for cooking and each household consumes some threetons of wood a year – all of which is putting pressure on Myanmar’s forests, particularlyin the dry zone.To tackle the problem, the A1 stove, an energy efficient cooking stove developedby Myanmar’s Forest Research Institute (FRI) has been distributed in the dry zone byEcodev. The stoves cost around $2 each and cut a household’s consumption of firewoodby one ton a year. With over 300,000 now in use, and 5000 a month being sold, a markethas been established for this simple energy-saving device.A 2009 report byenvironmentalwatchdog GlobalWitness founda dramaticdecrease in theillegal timbertrade betweenMyanmar andChina, but notessmuggling stillcontinues.National ParksBy an optimistic account, about 7% of Myanmar’s land area is made up ofnational parks and national forests, wildlife sanctuaries and parks, and otherprotected areas. However, such protection on paper is rarely translatedinto reality without the backing of adequate funds and effective policing.Apart from the parks and reserves covered in the table below and reviewedin full elsewhere in this guide, you may also want to enquire withspecialised travel agents about visits to the 103-sq-mile Chattin WildlifeSanctuary and the 620-sq-mile Alaungdaw Kathapa National Park, bothin Sagaing Region northeast of Mandalay, and both partly created to protectthe endangered thamin, a species of Eld’s Deer.Environmental IssuesMyanmar has little in the way of an official environmental movement.However, recycling and making use of every little thing is part of mostpeople’s daily life, disposability only being a luxury of the rich.Essentially no environmental legislation was passed from the time ofindependence in 1948 until after 1988. Since then, government dictums,such as recent efforts to ‘green the dry zone’ and protect wildlife, havebeen more words than action. ‘They may have laws on the books butthey mean extremely little’, says Sean Turnell, an expert on Myanmar’seconomy at Sydney’s Macquarie University.In 2009 the KoreaInternationalCooperationAgency (KOICA)launched a threeyearprogrammeworth $1.5 millionfor a reforestationproject inMyanmar’s dryzone.DeforestationMyanmar supposedly contains more standing forest, with fewer inhabitants,than any other country in Indochina. That said, it’s also disappearingfaster than almost anywhere else in Asia, and Myanmar’s forestsremain the most unprotected in the region.Much of Myanmar’s forest has fallen to the axe – for fuel and for timberexports (both legal and illegal) or due to clearing for farming. Oneof the most troubled areas is the so-called ‘dry zone’, made up of heavilypopulated Mandalay, lower Sagaing and Magwe divisions. Little of theoriginal vegetation remains in this pocket (which is about 10% of Myanmar’sland, but home to one-third of the population), due to growth inthe area’s population and deforestation.The problem isn’t new. Much of Britain’s 19th-century industrialisation,as well as the train tracks made here in Myanmar, were built fromBurmese timber. Following the 1988 putting down of the prodemocracyprotests, the government relaxed timber and fishing laws for short-termgain, ultimately causing more long-term problems.