Trade, Rural Poverty & the Environment Project Profiles

China

A team from the Asian International Rivers Center, based in Kunming, has investigated how the cataclysmic economic transformations related to China’s recent accession to the World Trade Organization and shift towards market-oriented policies has affected livelihoods and conservation in Pingbian, a poor rural area of Yunnan Province, in southwestern China.

Pingbian has seen a marked shift in recent years from the cultivation of traditional food crops like rice and wheat towards a more diversified economy that includes cash crop agriculture, such as vegetables, ornamental flowers, and medicinal plants that are exported within China and the Greater Mekong region and to Europe; as well as industry and ecotourism.

Rural poverty has declined, and conservation policies like China’s Grain for Green program have led to the retirement of marginal farmlands, the intensification of production in more suitable areas, and upland reforestation. But other environmental pressures are increasing around Pingbian due to industrial pollution, agrochemical adoption, and excessive harvesting of wildlife and non-timber forest products.

The effects of trade liberalization and associated economic transformation are now reaching even faraway places like Pingbian. As a result, local and provincial governments need to create new institutions that help residents to better manage the sometimes risky transition into a more externally focused, market-oriented economy; while protecting Yunnan’s valuable ecosystem services. This is particularly important given the area’s importance for biodiversity; and the fact that the Mekong, Red, Irrawaddy, and Salween rivers, on which millions of downstream livelihoods in Southeast Asia depend, flow out of this part of China.

WWF China is using the project findings to engage with government officials and local stakeholders to promote these kinds of innovative changes to policies and institutions; and to encourage more sustainable management of the natural resources and ecosystem services in the vicinity of Pingbian.