Vast swathes of protected forest on Phu Quoc Island have been illegally cut down by landowners holding fraudulently-obtained property rights.
“It looks like football fields scattered around the forest,” said a local resident on the country’s biggest island in the southern province of Kien Giang.
“They make double profit deforesting here because illegal loggers can sell the cleared land and the charcoal they make from the wood,” he said, adding that charcoal was easier to smuggle than pure timber.
In a recent case last month, a woman named Nguyen Thi Hong was found by park rangers clearing clinging plants from trees in a protected forest in Rach Ham Hamlet, Ham Ninh Commune.
But just a few days later, she was detected using heavy machinery to clear several hectares of trees at the site. She claimed that she was repairing a road to make it easier for local children to go to school.
However, hamlet head Nguyen Thanh Hung said he was not aware of the case and had not been instructed to supervise construction of such a road from higher authorities.
Nguyen Manh Tien, secretary of Ham Ninh Commune Party Unit, said there was a plan to construct the road, but it was still on paper and did not include forestland.
Thanh Nien visited the site cleared by Hong last week and found that mango and coconut saplings had been planted there.
“It will soon become her orchard,” a neighbor said.
Several other areas along Phu Quoc National Park’s border with Ham Ninh Commune were found with newly-cut stumps and cleared hillsides.
At Neighborhood 11 in Rach Ham Hamlet, many trees dozens of years old had been cut down and several makeshift ovens had been built to turn logs into charcoal.
Disputes
A Ham Ninh Commune local who identified himself only as L., said he migrated to Phu Quoc Island six years ago and had been recently hired by several local officials to clear forestland.
He said the communal deputy police chief promised to pay him for clearing the land with the approval of his permanent residence registration. However, he said the deputy had broken his promise after the area was cleared.
A park ranger at Phu Quoc National Park said a local named Lam Van Son was fined VND30 million (US$1,600) for having illegally cleared 1.2 hectares of forestland. However, Son was still able to claim ownership over the land plot, which is now worth at least VND1 billion ($54,000), he added.
Ironically, many owners like Son have shown the records of their violations as evidence of their ownership over cleared forest areas whenever disputes arise.
Pham Quang Binh, director of Phu Quoc National Park, admitted that deforestation in the area was increasing.
However, he said park management was unable to follow through on several cases in which arrested loggers had confessed to their crimes because they refused to reveal who had hired them.
‘Host of difficulties’
Binh called untrue rumors that the government would recognize the land ownership of illegal loggers so long as they could prove that they had used the cleared land in the past.
But Thanh Nien found that the Cadastre and Engineering Survey Company (CESC) under the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment had been including protected forestland into privately owned plots in Phu Quoc.
CESC is tasked with producing all official maps of private landholdings in Vietnam.
Binh said authorities opposed CESC’s wrongdoings.
But reports of misappropriation on the part of the firm are rampant.
One Ho Chi Minh City man known only as K. bought 7,500 square meters of land from local residents in Ham Ninh in 2003.
He had his land plot extended to 18,660 square meters in 2008 by submitting documents, including a map drawn by CESC, which included parts of a nearby protected forest as his own private property.
The case was only detected after three other locals simultaneously submitted applications for land use rights over parts of the land attributed to K. by the CESC map.
Upon investigation, Phu Quoc District authorities then said K.’s map had been mistakenly approved by commune authorities.
“CESC had wrongfully included forestland when drawing residential land maps and this caused a host of difficulties for forest managers,” said Nguyen Trung, director of Phu Quoc Protective Forest Management Board.
He also said this could also give residents the impression that all they had to do to obtain legal ownership over a plot of land would be to have CESC map in their name.