ENVIRONMENT & WILDLIFE
NATIONAL PARKS
326
National Parks
By an optimistic account, about 7% of Myanmar’s land area is made up of
national parks and national forests, wildlife sanctuaries and parks, and oth-
er protected areas. However, such protection on paper is rarely translated
into reality without the backing of adequate funds and eff ective policing.
Apart from the parks and reserves covered in the table below and re-
viewed in full elsewhere in this guide, you may also want to enquire with
specialised travel agents about visits to the 103-sq-mile Chattin Wildlife
Sanctuary and the 620-sq-mile Alaungdaw Kathapa National Park, both
in Sagaing Region northeast of Mandalay, and both partly created to pro-
tect the endangered thamin, a species of Eld’s Deer.Environmental Issues
Myanmar has little in the way of an offi cial environmental movement.
However, recycling and making use of every little thing is part of most
people’s daily life, disposability only being a luxury of the rich.
Essentially no environmental legislation was passed from the time of
independence in 1948 until after 1988. Since then, government dictums,
such as recent eff orts to ‘green the dry zone’ and protect wildlife, have
been more words than action. ‘They may have laws on the books but
they mean extremely little’, says Sean Turnell, an expert on Myanmar’s
economy at Sydney’s Macquarie University.Deforestation
Myanmar supposedly contains more standing forest, with fewer inhab-
itants, than any other country in Indochina. That said, it’s also disap-
pearing faster than almost anywhere else in Asia, and Myanmar’s forests
remain the most unprotected in the region.
Much of Myanmar’s forest has fallen to the axe – for fuel and for tim-
ber exports (both legal and illegal) or due to clearing for farming. One
of the most troubled areas is the so-called ‘dry zone’, made up of heavily
populated Mandalay, lower Sagaing and Magwe divisions. Little of the
original vegetation remains in this pocket (which is about 10% of Myan-
mar’s land, but home to one-third of the population), due to growth in
the area’s population and deforestation.
The problem isn’t new. Much of Britain’s 19th-century industrialisa-
tion, as well as the train tracks made here in Myanmar, were built from
Burmese timber. Following the 1988 putting down of the prodemocracy
protests, the government relaxed timber and fi shing laws for short-term
gain, ultimately causing more long-term problems.COOKING UP AN ECO SOLUTIONDawn over a Myanmar village: the mist you see is not the evaporation of dew, but the
smoke from fi rewood- and charcoal-fuelled cooking stoves. According to Win Myo Thu,
founder of the Myanmar NGO Ecodev (www.ecodev-mm.com), 90 per cent of Myanmar’s
population relies on fi rewood for cooking and each household consumes some three
tons of wood a year – all of which is putting pressure on Myanmar’s forests, particularly
in the dry zone.
To tackle the problem, the A1 stove, an energy effi cient cooking stove developed
by Myanmar’s Forest Research Institute (FRI) has been distributed in the dry zone by
Ecodev. The stoves cost around $2 each and cut a household’s consumption of fi rewood
by one ton a year. With over 300,000 now in use, and 5000 a month being sold, a mar-
ket has been established for this simple energy-saving device.In 2009 the Korea
International
Cooperation
Agency (KOICA)
launched a three-
year programme
worth $1.5 million
for a reforesta-
tion project in
Myanmar’s dry
zone.A 2009 report by
environmental
watchdog Global
Witness found
a dramatic
decrease in the
illegal timber
trade between
Myanmar and
China, but notes
smuggling still
continues.