5.3 The people in the buffer zone
5.3.5 Relationship between households and Cat Tien National Park
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5.3.5 Relationship between households and Cat Tien National
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Figure 6: The proportion of surveyed households entering to the park for forest product collection
Source: Household survey, Tran Duc Luan, 2006
A high 82 percent of the 50 interviewed Chau Ma households entered the park before 2000 (Figure 6). The Stieng group accounts for 86 percent while nearly 22 percent is accounted for Kinh people. Overall, 63 percent of households entered the park to collect forest products. Comparatively, in 2005 the proportion of households who entered the park seems to have decreased. Chau Ma accounts for 74 percent, Stieng accounts for 64 percent while Kinh accounts only for two percent. Overall, 47 percent households entered the park to collect forest products. Results of group discussion and in-depth interview with some key informants suggest that the local people’s behaviour towards their motivation to enter the park. The majority of them get bamboo shoots, rattans, firewood and other forest products. Women and children also entered the park. A person can generate a papoose (a basket type container placed hanging at the back) of 20 kg bamboo shoot a day estimated at about 30 thousand VND. Because of its sensitivity as an issue, the research employed the indirect questioning method to explore the collection of forest products by the local people. They did not reveal the quantity and value of forest products but they disclosed the price of some products they know. It is interesting to note that local people exactly know the unit price of each product. For example, there are two kinds of bamboo shoots. The raw bamboo shoot costs 500 vnd/kg while the preliminary treatment bamboo shoot costs 1,500 vnd/kg; special weasel (80,000-90,000 vnd/kg); normal weasel (50,000-60,000 vnd/kg); Java mouse-deer (40,000 vnd/kg); varan (45,000 vnd/kg);
porcupine (60,000 vnd/kg). Other prices of products such as wild boars, deer, monkeys and tortoises were also mentioned but local people do not know the price. A new issue
POINT OF TIME DECISION GROUPS PRIORITIES
Chau Ma 1. Forest Food
2. Material (e.g. fire wood, timber) 41 hhs 82%(*) 3. Hunting
Enter the Park Kinh 1. Forest Food
2. Material (e.g. fire wood, timber)
95 hhs 63% 11 hhs 22%(*) 3. Hunting
Before 2000 Stieng 1. Forest Food
## 2. Material (e.g. fire wood, timber)
150 hhs 100% 43 hhs 86%(*) 3. Others (medicine, honey, etc.)
Not enter the Park
Not use forest products
55 hhs 37%
Chau Ma 1. Forest Food
Comparison ## 2. Hunting
37 hhs 74%(*) 3. Material (e.g. fire wood, timber)
Enter the Park Kinh
Three categories
71 hhs 47% 2 hhs 4%(*)
Year 2005 Stieng 1. Forest Food
## 2. Hunting
150 hhs 100% 32 hhs 64%(*) 3. Material (e.g. fire wood, timber)
Not enter the Park
Not use forest products
79 hhs 53%
Notes: (*) = (Number of households entering the park) / (50 households interviewed) * (100)
hhs = households
Sample size = 150 households (50 hhs of Chau Ma People; 50 hhs of Kinh People; 50 hhs of Stieng People) Priorities = (1...3: Use much....not much of forest products)
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has emerged herein. Why do local people know the price? There is a suspicion that a secret market for forest products exist. And this seems to be an external threat for Cat Tien National Park.
There seems to be a strong evidence to substantiate the claim that there are varying behaviours exhibited between the three people groups in terms of their collection activities of forest products by using correspondence analysis. Correspondence analysis is simply a means for transforming numerical information into pictorial form (Greenacre, 1993). It has become very popular in areas of research where large tables of data are collected for which standard statistical methods are difficult to apply, for instance in sociology, marketing research, environmental science, psychology and archaeology.
Correspondence analysis is intended to reveal structures in the data rather than to confirm or reject hypotheses about the underlying processes that generate the data by testing these hypotheses against an a priori given mathematical model (Greenacre & Blasius, 1994). In this research, the author explored the causal relations within a closed system of variables to map different people groups (Chau Ma, Stieng and Kinh) and how they are related to forest product categories. Based on correspondence analysis, the author can communicate a complex data to relatively easy interpretable graphics. This is why correspondence analysis is useful in the study.
The two variables for correspondence analysis are “Ethnic” and “Collection” with two periods - before 2000 and year 2005 as reference points. The “Ethnic” variable includes Kinh, Chau Ma and Stieng people (with the coding Kinh = 1; Stieng = 2, Chau Ma = 3) while the “Collection” variable is the number of forest product categories. The data form of “collection” variable is one or any of the combination of the following forest product categories:
a) Forest food of flora (e.g. bamboo shoot, rattan, mushroom, “lá nhiếp”);
b) Materials (e.g. fire wood, timber);
c) Wild animals and fish (e.g. deer, wild boar) d) Others (e.g. medicine, honey).
“Lá nhiếp” is a Vietnamese name of one type of forest plant. It is considered as vegetable.
When entering the park, people can collect or hunt one or any of the combination of the above mentioned forest product categories. For instance, a woman collects bamboo shoots (category a) and fire wood (category b). In this case, she has collected two categories of forest products. Further, a man collects bamboo shoots (category a), medicine (category d) and hunts a deer (category c). Again in this case, he has collected forest products in three categories. Succeeding analysis will show which group of people collect more categories of products and which group are least collecting these products. The analysis of Figure 7 generates a variety of plots that graphically illustrate the underlying relationships between “ethnic” variable and “collection_before_2000” variable. Likewise the relationship between “ethnic” variable and “collection_2005” variable are described.
Figure 7 shows the scattered plots of the row and column scores for the two-dimensional solution. The second dimension separates Kinh people from Chau Ma and Stieng people, while the first separates “no collection” from “three and four categories”, with “one and two categories” in between. The symmetrical normalization makes it easy to examine the relationship between people and forest products. The evidence shows that Stieng people were near to the three categories and Chau Ma People were near to the four categories, while Kinh people were closest to “no collection”.
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Figure 7: Relationship between households and forest products before 2000 Source: Household survey, Tran Duc Luan, 2006
Figure 8: Relationship between households and forest products in 2005 Source: Household survey, Tran Duc Luan, 2006
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Figure 8 shows that, in 2005, the first dimension separates “one, two, three and four categories” from “no collection”, with nothing in between. The analysis appears to suggest that Kinh people were no longer using forest products as compared with Chau Ma and Stieng who still uses the products until the period of the field research. The correspondence analysis proves that Chau Ma and Stieng people still enter the park. Why is this so? According to group discussions and the household survey, Chau Ma and Stieng people enter the park for different reasons. One is the fact that the park has abundance of bamboo shoots (30% of the surveyed household). The others are the desire for forest food (25%), lack of food for household consumption (20%), lack firewood (15%) for fuel use.
Moreover, Chau Ma and Stieng people having lived in the forest for long are still used to their old ways of habits that young people are still highly influenced by their parents and ancestors manner of thinking and behaving towards the forest. This in turn requires time to change even if they are aware that entering the park is a gross violation.
Box 2: Why do Stieng and Chau Ma people still enter the park?
A Stieng respondent said: “The forest is the home of our ancestors. Hence, we often visit it if we need to”. The researcher explained that this was Cat Tien National Park forest law violation. “That is our right as indigenous people”, he asserted.
Source: In-depth interview, Tran Duc Luan, 2006
The desire for forest food as one of the main reasons for entering the park is an interesting finding of the study. Accordingly, Stieng people believe that “Lá nhiếp” is very delicious when cook for soup while Chau Ma people claimed that fish inside the park are large and have sweet meat. Group discussion with Ta Lai forest station guard, Stieng and Chau Ma people are familiar with the geographical situation of Cat Tien national park and thus some Kinh people take advantage of this geographical familiarity to abet Chau Ma and Stieng people to collect forest products and sell this for them. In turn, these products are transported to the secret market for money-making. Why do Kinh people rarely enter the park compared with other groups? The household survey revealed that the reason why most of Kinh people did not enter the park last year was that they were afraid of forest guards (34%), no time to enter because they were focused on crop cultivation (27%) and the remaining percent has reasons for health, unfamiliar terrain of the forest, fear for dangerous animals, and not care about forest for any purposes.
One interesting relationship between “above poverty line” group and forest products has emerged when the sample size was divided by a new poverty line of Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs. The new poverty line has been applied in Vietnam from 2006 – 2010 with 200 thousand VND per capita per month for rural area. The households belonging to the “above poverty line” group also enter the park for collecting forest products (Figure 9). The four main categories of forest products mentioned on the above section were still used for this analysis.
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Note:
- Total sample size: 150 households [85: above poverty line; 65: under poverty line]
- Value [0, 1, 2, 3, ..] in the vertical axis is the quantity of forest product categories
Figure 9: Relationship between household’s income and forest product categories in 2005 by three groups
Source: Household survey, Tran Duc Luan, 2006.
In particular, Figure 9 shows that the “above poverty line” group has 85 households in which 32 percent of Chau Ma households collecting 2.19 categories of forest products; 24 percent of Stieng households collected 1.4 categories of forest products; and 45 percent of Kinh households collected only 0.08 categories of forest products.
Table 7: The proportion of surveyed households that collected and used forest products
Above poverty line (n = 85)
Under poverty line (n = 65)
Total Sample (n=150) Particulars
Ethnic Minorities (n = 47)
Kinh (n=38)
Ethnic Minorities (n=53)
Kinh (n=12)
Ethnic Minorities (n=100)
Kinh (n=50)
No collection/use 43% 97% 21% 92% 31% 96%
Collection/use 57% 3% 79% 8% 69% 4%
Source: Household survey, Tran Duc Luan, 2006
Note: Ethnic Minorities include Chau Ma and Stieng people.
Error Bars show 95.0% Cl of Mean Dot/Lines show Means
Chau Ma Kinh Stieng
Ethnic
0.0 1.0 2.0 3.0
Collection_2005
>
>
>$
$
$ 2.2
31.76%
0.1 44.71%
1.4 23.53%
n=85
Above Poverty Line Under Poverty Line
Chau Ma Kinh Stieng
Ethnic
>
>$ >
$
$ 2.4
35.38%
0.3 18.46%
2.1 46.15%
n=65
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Although, the quantity of forest product categories collected by the “under poverty line” group seems to be higher than the “above poverty line” group, it is asserted that poverty is just one of the reasons that led people entering the park to collect forest products. According to Cat Tien national park management board, aside from collecting, hunting, fishing and trading forest products, other activities of people in buffer zone are also causing threats to natural and genetic resources of the park. On one hand the encroaching of forest land to transfer agricultural area and the pasturing of animal husbandry to the park affects the state of living conditions for wild animals while on the other hand some wild animals that come to the village destroy rice fields and other plants which cannot be controlled by the local people.
Box 3: A simple estimation of human pressure on Cat Tien National Park
According to Tran Van Mui (2006), there are over thirty people groups inside and offsite of Cat Tien National Park, in which Kinh (67.1%); Tay (11.1%); Nung (8.1%); Chau Ma (6.2%); Stieng (2.3%); HMong (1.1%); Dao (1.3%); Hoa (1.1%); Muong (0.7%); others (1.0%) constitute the population.
The proportion of surveyed households is representative for village 4, but should the research considers a larger scale to get a better picture of the entire Park, it needs to increase the sample size, particularly that of the Kinh households. Arbitrarily, the estimation of the human pressure on the park is developed on the assumption that the proportion of surveyed households (Table 7) entering the park to collect and use forest products is representative of the whole population in the buffer zone of Cat Tien National Park. As it is, Chau Ma and Stieng is about 69% while Kinh is about 4%
of the total 173,947 people who are both inside and offsite the Park.
The simple estimation on human pressure is calculated as follows:
People groups The proportion of people inside and offsite of the Park(*)
Estimation on the total human pressure to Cat Tien National Park
Kinh 67.1% {67.1% * 173,947 people * 4% } = 4,662
people
Chau Ma & Stieng 8.5% {8.5% * 173,947 people * 69% } = 10,202
people
Others 24.4% Not estimated
It seems that although the total population of Chau Ma and Stieng people is lower than Kinh people, the percentage of households entering the park and the number of human pressure exerted to the Park by Chau Ma and Stieng people is two times higher than Kinh. Therefore, it can be concluded that Chau Ma and Stieng people have heavy reliance on forest resources.
Source: (*): Tran Van Mui, 2006; Data estimate, Tran Duc Luan, 2006
The relationship between people and the park is stressed by the contract of forest protection initiated by the management board. Ta Lai village is one of zones given an area for forest protection. The area covered 600 ha in which Chau Ma and Stieng people have signed a contract with the Cat Tien national park management board. After signing a
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contract to protect the forest, households have a responsibility to check the changes of forest, discover violations, clear the runways, prevent and fight fire. At present, a total area is divided into six plots (100 ha per plot) where each plot has to be monitored and patrolled at least four times a month. The group of households set up a working schedule and divided themselves into four teams under the supervision of a group leader. Every team has a duty to patrol one plot in a month. On the following month, the four teams have to draw lots to select the new plots for protection. Time for patrolling is one day except on special cases. Before patrolling, the teams have to inform the Ta Lai forest station in order to feedback developments and changes within the park as well as receive instruction from staff of Cat Tien National Park. All households get a subsidy from the park’s management board.