The Ba Ren forest in Quang Binh province is reportedly “bleeding” because it has been poached by a lot of groups of people, hunting for teak wood. More and more groups of people go very far to Ba Ren, where they pitch camps to stay for several months and chop down trees, to look for rare and precious wood in the very large preventive forest in the central region of the country.
Teak wood, or “tau” in local language, includes different varieties. However, all of them are the types of precious wood, firm and durable with the life expectancy of hundreds of years. Therefore, teak wood has been favored by people who use the wood for building houses and construction works.
Besides, since teak wood is resistant to heat and rainwater, it has been used to build fences. Wood dealers say teak wood has been exported to other countries at high prices.
Therefore, teak wood has been hunted everywhere.
The groups of illegal lumberjacks always bring electric saws and fuel when going to the forest. They saw big trees with high capacity saws which would be charged with more fuel when the fuel runs out. Every time, after a new tree trunk falls down, they would clear the areas to get the sites for splitting wood.
The straight tree trunks would be whittled into foundation blocks which can be used as house pillars. Meanwhile, others would be split into flat blanks.
Every group of illegal lumberjacks has a small notebook, where they note down necessary information, including the number of tree trunks chopped down every day.
After sawing and splitting the wood, the lumberjacks would “hand over” the wood to other groups of people who are in charge of carrying the wood out of the forest to the targeted destinations. In general, buffalo are used to drag the wood consignments.
After that, the wood is carried to the Long Dai river area or loaded into trucks heading for Dong Hoi City, or Vinh Ninh commune.
It’s clear that the illegal lumberjacks are not the real owners of the precious wood. One of them told Saigon Tiep Thi’s reporters, who acted as farmers, that they were hunting for teak wood to provide to the five “big guys” in the area, who would then provide wood to the dealers from the north.
“They need teak wood in big quantities,” the lumberjack said. When asked about what they need to do to escape from the police watch, he said that no need to worry about that, because the “big guys” have paid underground money in return for the “silence” of the police and forest rangers.
M, another lumberjack in Quang Ninh, said teak wood now only exists in Ba Ren area. Therefore, wood dealers tell lumberjacks to go there to look for wood.
“How would you carry wood to the north to provide to the dealers?” a reporter asked. “Everything has to follow its way,” M replied.
Nguyen Viet Anh, Chair of the Quang Ninh district, in the working session with reporters, affirmed that the local authorities would try every possible measure to find out illegal lumberjacks. However, he could not say exactly how and what the authorities would do to obtain that goal.
As such, the Ba Ren forest still has been destroyed, because the precious wood there can bring money to a few groups of people. Meanwhile, the whole nation would suffer if the preventive forest cannot help prevent dangers any more.