Consumption patterns key to the future
Several days ago I went to the School of Agriculture, University of São Paulo for an interview with Professor Mario Tomazello Filho.
He had just been to the wood culture festival in East China’s Fujian Province and had brought back an exquisite furniture album that contained quite a few photos of antique rosewood furniture.
Filho told me that there are a variety of types of precious wood in Brazil, which were quite popular in the US and European markets in the past. However, Brazil has long forbidden cutting down or exporting such timber and even restricted the export of logs in recent years.
Warwick Manfrinato, manager of the Amazon rainforest protection program, told me that deforestation in the Amazon rainforest had generated wide attention from environmentalists in the early 1990s. However, people found later that prohibiting deforestation, even though it protected the environment, made local residents who heavily relied on timber export lose job opportunities and risk falling into the plight of poverty again.
Like many developed countries, Brazil eventually chose to chop down planted forests in accordance with designed plans coupled with wood processing technologies. Among developing nations, Brazil started a certification process at a relatively early time by launching the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification, which involves giving identity cards to various kinds of wood to prove that the wood purchased by manufacturing firms is from legitimately developed forests.
The launch of the FSC is relevant to views of consumption. What Filho said at the end of the interview touched me deeply. He said consumers should attach more importance to the quality of furniture instead of what kind of timber it is made from.
His words referred to people’s views of consumption and also reflected modern civilization.
As a large country with a population of 1.3 billion, Chinese views of consumption to a certain degree determine China’s relations with its neighboring countries and the world at large in this closely interconnected global village.
A recent survey showed that Indonesia lost 840,000 hectares of forest in 2012. It has witnessed the disappearance of forests at the fastest speed, with forests, the size of some 300 football fields, being destroyed per hour.
Many non-governmental organizations in the international community have attributed such massive deforestation to China’s enormous demand, because China imported a large quantity of logs from Indonesia during the past few years.
Of course, it goes to extremes to blindly condemn China, because a substantial part of the wood China imported was manufactured into furniture and then sold to other places in the world, notably the US and European countries.
Nonetheless, some Chinese people’s pursuits of rare and valuable timber including rosewood partly account for the rampant rosewood smuggling in Myanmar and Laos, which began to implement policies restricting log exports this year.
China has begun taking this issue seriously much earlier than these nations. In 1998 Beijing successfully revised relevant laws to constrain domestic deforestation, which has apparently ramped up overseas procurement. And China removed import tariff restrictions for logs and converted timber.
Recent years have seen frequent frictions with our peripheral countries, some of which were related to what and how we consumed.
For instance, the discontented sentiments among claimants to the South China Sea are not just caused by maritime demarcation and territorial sovereignty. Fishermen and environmentalists focus more on overfishing.
If we are living in a community of common destiny, then it is our responsibility to conserve our resources as well as those of our neighbors. We have no reason to sabotage these precious resources.
Peaceful development is not a hollow concept. We should start from changing our own consumption views to acquire the understanding from the rest of the world.