BAMBOO is the greatest of the grasses. Standing taller than any other, it provides refuge and food for rare species such as the giant panda of China and Africa鈥檚 gorillas. But at times, it can spark famines that affect millions of people, and that irony is now creating a conservation dilemma.
Following publication of two reports which reveal that one third of the world鈥檚 1200 species of woody bamboo are in danger of extinction, UN environment chiefs this week issued a plea for action to halt a 鈥渃atastrophic鈥� decline in wild bamboo. But farmers in north-eastern India take the opposite view: they want to cut down as much of it as possible before it flowers, fearing that its seeds will feed a plague of rats that will ravage their crops.
The farmers fear a repeat of the famines that have followed previous mass flowerings of the local bamboo Melocanna bambusoides. The flowering, which happens only once every half-century, is just beginning and is expected to peak within two years. After flowering, the bamboo produces large quantities of seed, and this leads to an explosion in the rat population. 鈥淲hen the seeds are all gone, the rats descend on neighbourhood farms,鈥� says Ian Hunter, director of the International Network for Bamboo and Rattan (INBAR), which this week published the first ever global survey of bamboo (see ). These plagues of rats have caused famines in 1861, 1911 and most recently in 1959, which precipitated a civil war in the north-eastern state of Mizoram, which is at the centre of the flowering.
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Local politicians and scientists in Mizoram are now calling for a mass harvest of bamboo. For while bamboo in the region can be a curse, it is also a potential gold mine. Thousands of farmers live by harvesting the bamboo, which can be used to make everything from perfumes to paper, furniture to musical instruments. 鈥淲e want to reverse the flowering phenomenon into an economic opportunity by harvesting all the bamboo in the state before it flowers,鈥� Pu Zoramthanga, the state鈥檚 chief minister, said last month.
Environmentalists are worried at Zoramthanga鈥檚 plan, however. Bamboo dies after it flowers, but the seeds it leaves behind quickly regenerate the forest. If the bamboo is harvested before it flowers, there will be no seeds and the forests could disappear. 鈥淭he survival of many potentially important bamboo species may be threatened, as they grow in forests that are shrinking under human pressure,鈥� says Hunter.