Economy- Bamboo's Economic Value To The North-East

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Bamboo's Economic Value To The North-East
S. Lamjagou Vaiphei
The impending catastrophe – the gregarious or synchronized flowering of Bamboo – raises grave concerns like what would happen to common rural northeasterners who depend on bamboo for almost everything - from a raw material to build their homes to food, and as one of the few sources of cash? Bamboo rotting over hundreds of acres and the growth of the rat population will have a devastating effect on the jhum (slash and burn) cultivation on which a majority of the rural folk still depends for growing food, thus affecting the already precarious food security of the rural people. Experts feel that women, who make up the majority of the rural work force and contribute more to holding up the rural economy, will be particularly vulnerable. Their major source of money income - such as the jhum field produce, the vegetables from the wild and the bamboo shoots which they gather and sell in town markets - would disappear, at least for a crucial period of time, seriously affecting the sparse family budget. Water, which is already a scarce resource in most of the hills, will become scarcer, the Mizoram experience shows. Experts say that during the bamboo flowering in Mizoram in the late 1950s and ’60s, there was a sharp rise in temperature followed by a spell of dry arid weather, which had a direct fallout on the health of the people. Not only that, women and children who have to spend hours to fetch water will be forced to spend even more time carrying out this task. Another concern is: What will be the fate of the numerous paper mills that employs thousands of local people in the northeast region? People have to be made aware beforehand to mitigate the devastating consequences of the phenomenon,” says Kamesh Salam, head of the UNIDO-supported Cane and Bamboo Technology Cell in Jorhat. Bamboo has a big potential for generating employment. The National Mission on Bamboo aims at creating 8.6 million jobs and at helping five million families to cross the poverty line. According to APJ Abdul Kalam, the President of India in his message on the National Mission on Bamboo Technology and Trade Development once said, ‘Bamboo is unique species which can provide employment to the rural population. In addition, its nutritional value for removing micro-nutrient deficiency and anemia makes it suitable for a major thrust. I am sure that this mission will be one of the instruments for poverty eradication and as such will require concerted efforts by the farming community, scientist, craft persons, entrepreneurs and Government agencies to achieve that objective’. The ‘bamboo’ also called poor man’s timber, is one of the most important forestry species having wide distribution throughout the country and has major contribution to the rural economy of India. Of the 1250 species under 75 genera distributed throughout the world, bamboo in India is represented by 145 species belonging to 23 genera under sub-family Bambusoideae of family Poaceae. Bamboo forests in India occupy an extent of approximately 10.03 million hectares (mha), which constitutes almost 12.8% of the total forest area of the country (GOI, 2001). About 28% of the total bamboo area of the country is located in North-East India. The principal bamboo genera occurring in North-East India include Arundinaria, Bambusa, Chimonobambusa, Dendrocalamus, Dinochloa, Gigantochloa, Melocanna, Indocalamus, Ochlandra, Drepanostachyum, Phyllostachys, Pleioblastus, Pseudoxytenanthera, Schizostachyum, and Thamnocalamus. The distribution of species and the quantity of bamboos, however, is uneven and more than 50% of the bamboo species and 66% of growing stock out of about 80.42 million tonnes (GOI, 2001) occurs in North-East India. There are about 1500 documented applications of bamboos, of which major ones include use in building materials, agricultural implements, furniture, musical instruments, food items, handicrafts, large bamboo based industries (paper pulp, rayon etc.), packaging, to name a few. Lightweight, durable, and more easily renewable than wood, bamboo can be woven, mashed into pulp, and pressed into fiberboard. Bamboo’s utility, and its ubiquity in some of the world’s poorest regions, has led some, including India’s former prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, to refer to the plant as “green gold.” “A man can sit in a bamboo house under a bamboo roof, on a bamboo chair at a bamboo table, with a bamboo hat on his head and bamboo sandals on his feet. He can at the same time hold in one hand a bamboo bowl, in the other hand bamboo chopsticks and eat bamboo sprouts. When through with his meal, which has been cooked over a bamboo fire, the table may be washed with a bamboo cloth, and he can fan himself with a bamboo fan, take a siesta on a bamboo bed, lying on a bamboo mat with his head resting on a bamboo pillow. His child might be lying in a bamboo cradle, playing with a bamboo toy. On rising he would smoke a bamboo pipe and taking a bamboo pen, write on a bamboo paper, or carry his articles in bamboo baskets suspended from a bamboo pole, with a bamboo umbrella over his head. He might then take a walk over a bamboo suspension bridge, drink water from a bamboo ladle, and scrape himself with a bamboo scraper (handkerchief)”. One of the more futuristic uses of bamboo was recently tested at the Earthquake Engineering and Vibration Research Centre in Bangalore. The center has a state-of-the-art “tri-axial earthquake simulator” - a computer- controlled 3-by-3-meter platform mounted on hydraulic shocks. A prototype house built entirely of bamboo - with bamboo-reinforced concrete walls and a waterproof, resin-coated bamboo roof - was subjected to five consecutive 30-second pulses equivalent to 7.8 on the Richter scale. “We subjected it to the highest level of earthquake to be found anywhere in the world, and it didn’t even crack the paint,” says Paul Follett of the Timber Research and Development Association (TRADA), based in Britain, which helped conduct the tests with funding from the British government. TRADA’s mandate on this project is to design safe, affordable, sustainable housing for the developing world. Whatever developments are made will be “open source” - freely available to whoever wishes to use them. According to Follett, this bamboo-based housing technology has the potential to provide disaster relief around the world. Easily prefabricated, the structures can be put up in three weeks, and last 50 years. At $5 a square foot, costs are roughly half of traditional “brick-and-block” construction, and mass production would probably drive the costs down further. With the wide variety of goods that can be produced from bamboo, Follett sees it as being able to provide not only housing, but a sustainable livelihood. He dreams of an entire social economy based around the plant. Nearly 1 billion people worldwide live in some sort of bamboo structure, including 75 percent of the population of Bangladesh. There have been more than 1,500 documented uses for bamboo, and by one estimate the annual economic value of total bamboo consumption is $10 billion. By 2015, that figure is expected to double. Over two million tons of edible bamboo shoots – rich in vitamins and low in carbohydrates, fats and proteins - are consumed around the world every year, mostly in Asia. The Northeast region has abundant bamboo resource. 65% of bamboo in the country and 20% of the world are grown in the region. 1250 species of bamboo in 75 genera are available in the world. Next to China, India has the richest bamboo genetic resources in 136 species including eleven exotic species out of which 58 species belonging to 10 genera are found in the Northeast. TIFAC is planning to produce electricity soon from bamboo through gasification. According to United Nation’s Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), the bamboo business in the Northeast region would be worth Rs. 5,000 crores in the next 10 years. National Mission on Bamboo Technology and Trade Development envisages expansion of the India’s bamboo market to US $5.5 billion by 2015. This is an achievable objective as the bamboo economy is largely unorganized and therefore will respond quickly to systematic improvement as envisaged under the mission. This will create economy growth with stronger thrust on employment generation. The mission aims to implement an action program with the objective of placing bamboo as a key component in the National effort to generate employment and mitigate environmental degradation and strengthen the process of bamboo base industrial development including handicrafts. A thriving economy revolves around bamboo. The pulp and paper industry, construction, cottage industry and handloom, food, fuel, fodder and medicine annually consume about 22 million tons of bamboo. “If left un-harvested this means a loss of around Rs. 12,000 million,” said Director General of the Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education R P S Katwal, at the latest round of UNIDO-sponsored expert consultations on “Strategies for Sustainable Utilization of Bamboo Resources Subsequent to Gregarious Flowering in North-East”. (With inputs from Linda Chhakchhuak, The Assam Tribune) * The article was originally published in The DayAfter, An International Illustrated News Magazine of India. * Permission for republication of this article is awaited. Due to the importance of the said article, ManipurOnline has taken the liberty to republish this article. *** You may visit www.dayafterindia.com for further readings.

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