In the context of the changed relations with forests and changing forest management practices discussed above, indigenous grassroots groups existed in the forest sector in all three villages, often centred on illegal logging. This was because, from being the owners of forests prior to 1945, local people had now become “thieves” in the word of one female villager from Village B, who illegal logging as “an act of a thief in the night” (household interview). In this regard, the findings from the three case study sites suggest that indigenous forest-based grassroots groups are not necessarily driven by the need to protect forests. A common feature for all three villages’ indigenous forest-based groups was that they were resistance strategies by local people to claim their rights to forests.
In Village B, when agriculture-based livelihoods were not paid attention to in the 1980s and early 1990s, illegal timber extraction was a main livelihoods for local people as discussed in
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Section 5.3.3 in Chapter 5) During that period, as a result of more difficult access and increased scarcity of good timber for illegal logging in the mid 1980s, the need for villagers to work together in groups to open roads to more distant logging sites became greater. By 1985, “we had
several groups of five or six illegal loggers in this village, formed to help members to deal with the increased difficulty of accessing good timber”, said an ex-logger in a household interview.
These groups were able to form and operate in the past (these groups ceased to exist in mid 1990s when almost no good timber left for extraction), because like the Crop Protection Group, “we found that if we work together we can share the cost of opening the path to access timber.
Also, we can cut timber together and increase the volume of extracted timber”, said the same
man.
Moreover, a group’s ‘ownership’ of a patch of forest was established once members of that group had opened road access to it (usually by hiring temporary labour), related the village administrative leader who was also an ex-logger. The group could then decide who was allowed to enter the patch of forest and use its access road (household interviews with ex-loggers). In this way, a group’s ownership over its claimed patch of forest, supported by de facto rights to forest, helped it to exclude unwanted competitors from the forest, thereby increasing the benefits (in terms of volume of timber that could be extracted illegally) to be gained from cooperation (in the form of pooling labour for timber extraction and sharing the costs of road construction). These groups thus became the preferred form of cooperation for forest management (albeit illegal) during the time when exploitable timber was still abundant.
To support their group operations, illegal loggers in Village B, used their de facto rights to forests in supporting their activities. Although the forests where villagers from Village B engaged in illegal timber extraction were under the management of Dakrong Nature Reserve and outside the administrative boundary of their village, their de facto rights to these forests were accepted by the inhabitants of the villages these forests fell under administratively. This was because Village B and nearby villages used to belong to a single administrative unit under the French administrative system (household interview with the Trưởng Làng of Village B), and all used to have access to forests that were now placed under the management of the nature reserve management board and divided under different administrative units.
Armed with their de facto rights, illegal loggers extracted forests the way they found fit. In the words of one ex-logger “although forests belong to nobody (because they are common property
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where”. This effectively certified de facto rights to each patch of forests to each group of
loggers. With the aforementioned de facto rights, illegal loggers in Village B could realise access and withdrawal rights in the eyes of other villagers, as well as exclude people from outside of the former administrative unit from ‘their’ forests. “No outsiders were allowed to log
forests in this area. Outsiders, if any, were hired as labourers only to support these groups to open roads or saw trees”, explained an ex-logger in a household interview. In so doing, they
claimed back their traditionally used resources and defied de jure property rights imposed by the government.
In this activity, loggers developed a mutual understanding of (illegal) rights of access and withdrawal. As the ex-logger continued, “everyone respects other people’s access to that specific
patch of forest. As such, we never have any dispute over this”. This showed a high level of
mutual agreement among illegal loggers about how to use (illegal) forest resources and a certain level of trust in one another. In this sense, the destruction of forests as result of illegal logging revealed both community cohesion to challenge the state ownership over forests (i.e. everyday form of resistance by local people) and a negative effect of the power struggle between the state and people, which has also been seen in countries outside Vietnam (see Chapter 2).
Although the establishment of indigenous grassroots groups for illegal logging in Village B did not lead to sustainable forest management, lessons can be learnt from this form of cooperation. Like the indigenous agriculture-based groups, in the operation of these indigenous forest-based groups, it was important that people involved agreed to share the short-term cost. By associating with each other, illegal loggers found the illegal logging group a means to reduce the cost of extracting timber and protect their benefits. The right to each forest block was established only after a path to it was opened. In that regard, anyone could access a block of forest without a path. As a result, by sharing the cost of building a path, illegal loggers secured both their right to cut their forest (illegally) and an opportunity to reduce the cost of extracting the timber. In that regard, associating with others to share the cost of opening the path, illegal logging found the power to protect their benefits (see the discussion on associational ties of power in Chapter 2). Although this associational tie in illegal logging did not produce positive outcome to forest, the existence of the group showed the prevalence of cost and benefit calculations in deciding collective action as discussed in Section 2.6 in Chapter 2.
In addition, securing widespread recognition (among local resource users) over rights to forests and agreed borders of the forest block were prerequisites for the existence of these groups, which
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is also a finding from elsewhere, as discussed in Section 2.6 in Chapter 2. In this case, group- based rights of access, withdrawal and exclusion (albeit unofficial) were sufficient to pull people together in collective action for forest exploitation. However, whether these rights will be enough to encourage people to work together in groups for sustainable forest management needs more investigation (see Chapters 7 and 9).
Turning attention away from Village B, at the time of the fieldwork, indigenous grassroots groups for illegal logging were detected in Villages A and C. Their resistance strategy, via the practice of illegal logging with different techniques, helped local people acquire the timber they needed for house construction. Taking in turn, this section now discusses illegal logging by people in Village C. In contrast to Village B, illegal logging by this type of group in Village C was not geared towards income generation. As a woman said during a transect walk through the village pasture fields:
“My husband and his friends often organise themselves in groups of five to search
for good timber for house construction from forests belonging to nearby villages. The group goes out two or three weeks every year when forests are dry (because all
work was done manually) until enough timber is collected (about 7 m3) for house
construction. My husband has already been out for two weeks this time”.
As in the case of Village B, the forests these groups exploited were used by their village before the adjustment of village administrative boundaries in the early 1990s. As such, group access to timber in other forests surrounding them was not challenged by local people although, in the eyes of the local FPD, it was illegal for them to log timber (even for their own consumption). A focus group discussion with men in Village C revealed that shared characteristics among group members were the key for this group to work as effectively as their wives’ group for weeding coffee and rice fields. However, in contrast to the groups formed for agricultural cooperation, this type of group lasted longer. This is because, in the context of province-wide forest degradation, searching for and transporting timber located one or two days’ walk away from the village took time, and often could also only take place in the dry season, once per year. Therefore, members of this group might require several years to collect sufficient timber to construct one house, said one man during the focus group discussion.
My observations from living in Village C showed that, because persons who called for help from others (thus initiating the formation of the timber extraction group) had to have enough money to feed group members during the whole period of timber extraction (i.e. two or three weeks each year over a period of say three years), only households with relatively high economic status
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could pursue this option. Those who attended the group but did not have resources to pay for others to come to help could receive help from group members in other activities as a member of a timber extraction group said in a household interview:
“We extend our rotational support to members for activities other than timber
extraction. We give a hand to group members who need help in any other heavy manual work, such as erecting foundations of a house, clearing a new plot for a coffee plantation or constructing a channel to a rice field”
In doing so, all group members either poor or better off could still enjoy the benefit of collective action. Also, the indigenous forest-based group in Village C did not concentrate strictly on illegal logging. This made the group more like one operating across a broader spectrum of village life.
Due to a lack of resources to sponsor collective action, groups for timber extraction were not present in Village A, where, for most households, finding enough food for every meal was a more urgent priority than house construction. Instead, if a household head in Village A had some money (but not enough) to cover the cost of timber cutting, he or she would use a different route to obtain timber for his or her house construction: making a deal with illegal loggers. Observations and interviews with both female and male-headed households during my stay in the village indicated that, according to these deals, illegal loggers hired for cutting timber (by motor saws) could be paid in kind by being allowed to cut an extra amount in the name of the household in need. Indeed, given that people in Village A were allowed by the local government to extract timber from Bac Huong Hoa Nature Reserve for house construction (said a FPD officer in an in-depth interview), this, in effect, provided illegal loggers with an excuse to cut timber without a logging permit. Engaging in such deals, explained two interviewed households in this village, was cheaper (i.e. more affordable) and quicker than group formation. In this regard, the need for cooperation among villagers was corrupted by the powerful economic drive of illegal logging in the area, which supported the argument of political ecologists.
In view of the above, indigenous forest-based grassroots groups, despite not being revolutionary in the sense of the Marxism school of thought on grassroots organisations, provided local resource users with a locus for resistance and counter-hegemony to claim their share in forest resources. In this sense, local people in all three villages were more concerned about who among
them (rather than the government who had de jure property rights) ‘owned’ (or had de facto
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6.4. Conclusion
In analysing indigenous grassroots groups in agricultural and forestry sectors, several lessons can be drawn. In both sectors, calculation of costs and benefits emerging from a collective action played an important role in deciding whether the collective action could proceed. When the costs were perceived as being lower than the expected benefits, people made efforts to implement collective action. In areas where the costs of collective action were commonly perceived as higher than the predicted benefits, such as harvesting crops prior to the onset of the wet season or protecting new forest plantations, cooperation among villagers through indigenous grassroots groups was not even attempted. In addition, despite being relatively stronger in the agricultural sector, these indigenous grassroots groups were still fragile, being limited, as they were, to practical issues for instance protecting crops, sharing workloads for seed sowing and weeding, and illegal logging. Cooperation in these groups often lasted for short periods of time with prospects of benefits from cooperation being visualised clearly.
In the forestry sector, de facto rights to forests influenced the operation of indigenous forest- based grassroots groups. Due to these de facto rights, local people at the study sites could access forests that belonged administratively to different villages, thus managing to avoid conflicts over illegal timber exploitation and ensuring more effective cooperation in their illegal forest use. Also, the existence of indigenous grassroots groups for illegal timber extraction marked the resistance of local people against the domination of state forest ownership, while the existence of these groups in the agriculture sector served as a practice ground for self-organising.
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