The 2nd Asia-Pacific Forestry Week was held in Beijing last week and China is an appropriate choice as venue, especially as it is being celebrated as the outstanding global achiever in reforestation.

From 2000 to 2005, replanting of forests occurred at a scale of roughly two to five million hectares each year, rising by 2008 to over five million hectares each year. Future targets for the next decade are equally grand, such as an additional 40 million hectares in forest cover by 2020 and attaining a 42% forest cover of total land area by 2050. This development is all the more remarkable, since this growth in forest cover equals the catastrophic loss of forest cover in the rest of Asia.

Much of the success gleaned in these figures can be traced at least in part to the parallel success of the Chinese economy in poverty alleviation and economic development, both among households and as a country as a whole. Chinese statistics show a rapid decline in rural poverty from 30.7% in 1978 to 3.6% in 2009.

The turning point for China's forest cover expansion seems to have arrived in 1998, when after the devastation of the Yangtze floods, the Chinese government began to recognize and treat reforestation as high priority. It launched several massive well-funded programs, one of which was the National Forest Protection Program, aimed at protecting through an effective log ban the remaining 61 million hectares of forests in the upper reaches of the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers and the 33 million hectares of forests in the northeast and in Inner Mongolia. Its first phase, from 2000 to 2100, enjoyed a budget of US$ 17.8 billion, while its second phase budget, from 2010 to 2020, is even double that, at US$32.4 billion.

On the other hand, strongly supported by a US$ 64.7 billion budget from 2000 to 2016, the Conversion Croplands to Forests Program, also known as the Grains to Green program, pursued the ambitious objective of returning farmland on slopes greater than 25 degrees to forest or grass cover.

In both programs, the government plowed to farming and upland communities a large amount of massive and apparently adequate subsidies that supported households in tree planting and environmental work. Previously, net gains in forest cover tended to be at the expense of the natural forests, such as from 1981 to 1991, when the increase in net forest cover by 18 million hectares also involved a loss of 9 million hectares of natural forests.

The allocation of generous amounts of public funds to replanting owes much to what social scientists describe as a process of industrialization and economic modernization of the Chinese economy to a point that it is today sometimes dubbed the industrial powerhouse or workshop of the world.

The resulting economic benefits of such a modernization and industrial policy for the Chinese economy can be said to have enabled such a massive tree replanting program through the years. Not only did it allow the Chinese government to provide a huge quantity of subsidies in both money and kind, such as rice and food stocks, to participating tree-planting-and-tending households, it also provided more stable and higher additional sources of income in the form of markets for non-timber products such as fruits.

Moreover, the booming industrial economy also offers more off-farm jobs for upland forest communities that can augment household incomes. Unlike other Asian countries which have not yet managed to develop or industrialize, China can be said to have secured the financial and developmental wherewithal to back up whatever is its agenda and political will regarding the environment, whether in becoming the world leader in renewable and wind turbine energy, or, in this case, massive forest cover expansion.

However, the phenomenal tree-planting achievements made possible by robust industrial growth and income in today's Chinese economy has its downside.

First, while China's forest management policy and program appears to be a resounding success in expanding the quantity of forest cover, it also appears that the same cannot be said for the quality of forest cover, especially in terms of ecological values such as biodiversity.

Some Chinese scientists have drawn attention to the fact that much of the afforestation in China involved the spread of monoculture, a characteristic of plantations, especially fruits, rubber, and eucalyptus. Statistics reveal that an average of 1.9 million hectares of the annual expansion of forest cover each year for the past three decades has been in the form of plantations.

Moreover, there is also the concern that this tree planting is propagating exotic species alien to the local ecosystems, such as Japanese pine. As monocultures, this type of forest cover fails to attain the rich biodiversity that China, with the world's greatest altitudinal variation, from Everest to the Turfan Depression at 154 meters below sea level, is recognized for. While admittedly raising household incomes, the prosperity from tree farming appears to be at the expense of biodiversity.

One possible indicator of China's inadequacies in valuing forest biodiversity is the ongoing lack of an inventory and assessment of the biodiversity of its forests. Another indicator cited by scientists is that the rates of soil erosion and water loss have not improved despite the expanded forest cover.

The shortcoming in forest management and regeneration is accentuated by what Chinese and non-Chinese scientists, together with a number of Chinese government officials, as "major challenges" to China's biodiversity. China's southwest region, for instance, hosts one of the country's only two remaining tropical forests as well as the word's most endemic-rich temperate forest, and is now designated a global environmental hotspot. Some reports place remaining forests in the region at only 5%.

Ironically, as in China's other tropical forest region, Hainan Island, primary old-growth forests are being eaten by the spread of what is officially encouraged in expanding forest cover, in particular, tree farms and plantations, such as rubber or eucalyptus. Driven in part by rising world prices of natural rubber, this trend is also encouraged by multinational and Chinese rubber companies cashing in on China's frenetic drive towards an automobile-oriented economy.

Efforts to develop biodiverse naturally regenerated forests in China therefore face the challenge of pressures arising from development successes. A research organization involved in what has been acclaimed as a success story in assisted natural forest regeneration combined with sustainable non-timber livelihoods such as orchids and honey for indigenous communities in Xishuangbanna, Yunnan province, has reported what it calls a deliberate forest fire set mostly likely by cattle ranchers in the area (see related news report in ESSCNews).

Meanwhile, while China expanded its protected forest areas to 12.8% of its national territory, the world's second largest, Chinese officials themselves acknowledge that illegal logging, poaching, and farming persist to a significant degree in these nature reserves. The illegal poaching is largely driven by the increased consumerism and household power to purchase animal-based traditional medicine at the expense of China's forest biodiversity. The illegal logging however was largely curbed by what can be considered another downside of China's development and industrial growth.

The other downside is that although China's industrial prosperity eased its hunger to deplete its own natural resources for national income in contrast to its poor underdeveloped Asian neighbors, it now has the wealth and economic power to access tropical natural resources, including logs from Indonesia, Malaysia and Burma, at the expense of poor countries and their primary forests.

In the face of China's remarkable forest cover achievements, the question for many is if China can achieve a comparable success in terms of its own and other countries' forest biodiversity.