Burning Down the House Myanmar’s Destructive Charcoal Trade

https://news.mongabay.com/2017/10/burning-down-the-
house-myanmars-destructive-charcoal-trade/
 A nearly year-long investigation by Mongabay led to a
multi-part reporting project into the illegal production
and trade of charcoal in Myanmar.
 One route for charcoal sales from Myanmar to China
documented by Mongabay could generate as much as
$10 million a year in payoffs alone to Burmese
government officials.
 The cheap energy source is used to make a massive
range of products, from solar panels to sex toys to the
silicon chips used in laptops and other mobile devices.
 In this series, reported for Mongabay by investigative
journalist Emmanuel Freudenthal with photography and
videography by Nathan Siegel, we go behind the curtain
to reveal a world of conflicting interests, needs, and
loyalties in forest management and conservation.

BHAMO, Myanmar – A trader turns off his truck’s engine at
yet another checkpoint and, again, the soldiers ask him for
cash. His truck is filled with charcoal from Myanmar,
destined for factories in China’s mountainous southwest
province of Yunnan.
The charcoal will be fed into furnaces to produce silicon
metal, a material so versatile it is used to manufacture
everything from metal alloys to silicon chips and solar
panels. Despite the cross-border charcoal trade being illegal,
the practice contributes greatly to the livelihoods of modest
farmers and traders in Myanmar’s riverside villages.
But every year, about 14,000 soccer fields of forests go up in
flames to feed the smelters, while corrupt officials, especially
in the military, collect bribes worth $1.2 million a year, and
possibly over $10 million.
A nearly year-long investigation by Mongabay documents for
the first time the routes used in this trade as well as its
benefits and pitfalls.

Myanmar’s village-made charcoal
In a thick forest near the regionally significant Irrawaddy
River, a little upstream from the town of Katha, a cigarette in
his hand, Myo Htun, a youthful-looking 38-year-old man,
crouches next to a charcoal oven. It’s a big pile of burning
wood covered with mud and it has just been cut open. Htun’s
wife is raking the black blocks of wood away from the
smouldering mound while his brother cools them down with
water. A thick, wet smoke rises from the embers, engulfing
the workers.
A truck is standing nearby. It’s hard to tell if it broke down a
decade ago, or if it’s just parked. It’s Htun’s truck, and he
uses it to carry other people’s charcoal from the forest to his
village; but during the rainy season his neighbours are busy
with other activities. Htun explains that “it’s difficult to make
charcoal in the rainy season … when it rains, the water
dissolves and washes away the soil we piled up [to make the

oven].” He says it’s the first time he has made charcoal and
he won’t be caught doing it during the rainy season again.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdQgMfbjePw
Htun and his family use the stumps of rosewood trees, left
over from the valuable timber first chopped down by Htun’s
forefathers. Nearly all the valuable trees in the forests around
the town of Katha have been felled and exported, first by the
British colonialists and then by the Myanmar government.
With the stumps, Htun makes little squares of flooring, then
he recycles the leftovers as charcoal. However, most
producers in the area use standing trees such as Ceylon oak
(Schleichera oleosa).
When they’re done, Htun’s brother and their wives will sell
their production to a trader in their village. For the hefty
work, he reckons he’ll get around $150, split equally between
the two families.
Htun hopes to earn enough to pay for his three children’s
schooling. His eldest daughter has failed her final year of
high school, so he’ll have to spend about $1,000 on her
board and education. When she graduates, she wants to
open a beauty salon, then Htun will have to find more money,
so he’ll take up odd jobs as a mechanic, a driver, and
perhaps make charcoal again.

A birds-eye view of Katha, a town along the Irrawaddy River in
northern Myanmar. Charcoal is produced in large quantities in
villages near Katha and then transported up the river by boat to the
town of Bhamo. From Bhamo, the charcoal is taken by truck across
the border with China, all of which is done illegally. Photo by
Nathan Siegel for Mongabay.
Like in other riverside villages near Katha and a long way
upstream, nearly everyone in Htun’s village produces
charcoal along with their other livelihoods such as growing
rice. It’s illegal to export charcoal made from wood, and most
farmers don’t have the required permits to produce it in the
first place; but “if the police arrested all those who make
charcoal, then the prison would not have enough space,” as
another producer told Mongabay.
A grandma’s place in trade
One of the most important charcoal traders in Htun’s village
is a sharp-witted, wrinkly grandmother who asked to remain
anonymous. Her shop bordering the river sells biscuits and
other small goods.
Much of the day, she sits in the back, drinking tea with a
friend – either trading the wisdoms of old age, or just
gossiping about the village. In the courtyard behind her shop

stands a tall wall of pale green bags filled with lumpy
charcoal.
She pours a cup of tea from a thermos waiting for
unexpected guests, and says she’s been trading charcoal for
the past 10 years.
Wood that was cut for charcoal production near Katha, northern
Myanmar. Villages in this area used to cut teak and other valuable
trees for export, but have since started producing charcoal. The
charcoal being exported to China can be made from any tree,
regardless of size or kind. This amount of trees could produce about
150 bags of charcoal. Photo by Nathan Siegel for Mongabay.
“We used to sell only a small quantity, like a boat full of
charcoal,” she said. Then from 2012-2014, “there was a huge
illegal timber trade … now the government is taking action
and people switched to this charcoal business.” At that time,
around 2014, the demand for charcoal from China picked up,
she says, confirming what other traders also said. Then, “the
whole village joined the charcoal business.”

“People here are poor and all they do is charcoal and
farming,” she said. “When people here cannot do charcoal
business, they have no money to spend.”
Yet she has surprisingly mixed feelings about the trade.
“We know that it causes deforestation,” she said. She added
they also know problems will arise once all the trees are cut
down. “It will become hotter. There will be climate change.”
It’s not all bad, though.
“After cutting down trees for charcoal production, some
people plant trees using seeds provided by the government,”
she said. “They grow teak on that land to make the
environment green.”
A couple of days later, a line of a dozen young women
wearing a round patch of sandalwood makeup on their
cheeks appear next to the tea shop. One by one, they head to
the wall of charcoal bags and carry one on their shoulder.
Under the watchful eye of the chubby captain, they slowly fill
a barge moored nearby, skillfully balancing on the rickety
planks laid between the shore and the boat.

Charcoal bags waiting to be transported near Katha, Myanmar. The
charcoal will be sent to Bhamo before going to China. Photo by
Nathan Siegel for Mongabay.
The boat is headed to the town of Bhamo upstream in Kachin
State; this is where the trader’s daughter lives, and she will
arrange to sell the charcoal in China.
An upriver path
Although it’s quite large, the boat is rudimentary. Its deep
wooden hull is topped by a tarpaulin roof. At the back, just
above the engines, an open platform serves as the boat’s
bridge and sleeping quarters.
The captain says he’ll have to pay around $300 to $350 in
bribes to the officials manning checkpoints along the river,
but he’s more worried about getting stuck on sandbanks. For
each ton of charcoal that floats up the Irrawaddy, an
estimated $10 to $25 is pocketed by corrupt officials,
particular those in Myanmar’s Forest Department, according
to research conducted for this investigation.
Finally, the boat’s engines come to life, coughing a thick
cloud of black smoke, and the journey to Bhamo begins. It
takes a long day of fighting the current and whirlpools of the
Irrawaddy River, meandering through a landscape of
alternating rice paddies and steep, forested hills.

Myanmar’s history has also floated along this river. In 1885,
the English, who had already colonized Burma’s coast, set
their eyes on the precious teak of the hinterland. They sent
boats up the Irrawaddy to the king’s palace in Mandalay and
snatched control of the country within a couple of weeks.
The king and his court were sent downstream and then into
exile in India.
In the following decades, the Irrawaddy would prove its
worth to the British Empire. Teak’s strength and water
resistance provided railway sleepers and ships’ hulls,
bringing considerable income to the British. The teak logs
that were felled in remote forests could be exported at
unprecedented speed by floating them down from forest
camps, to sawmills and then abroad. After Burma’s
independence in 1948, teak remained one of the country’s
main sources of income and the Irrawaddy one of the main
routes for its trade.

Locals load charcoal bags onto a boat near Katha, Myanmar. The
boat is bound for Bhamo, where the charcoal will be taken by trucks
over the border to China. Photo by Nathan Siegel for Mongabay.
Now, charcoal takes the reverse route, up the Irrawaddy, to
join the stream of natural resources flowing from Myanmar to
China, which in turn nourishes the global demand for
consumer goods.
Crossing the border by river and road
According to the couple dozen people Mongabay
interviewed, the charcoal exported to China transits via
Bhamo – a riverside town where the Irrawaddy bends to lick
the Chinese border. In a few makeshift ports, the boats spill
their merchandise – charcoal, rice, maize – onto trucks
destined for China. Bhamo is a quiet town, but the state of
Kachin where it is located is home to a long-running conflict
between the Myanmar government and a Kachin Army
seeking independence for the region’s distinct ethnic group.
The road from Bhamo to China is busy, and exporting
charcoal is not so simple. U Kyaw Zaw, director of the

Natural Forests and Plantations Division in the Forest
Department of the Ministry of Natural Resources and
Environmental Conservation, told Mongabay in an interview
that “the use of firewood and charcoal is one of the major
causes of deforestation.”
Charcoal bags stored in a lot in Bhamo, Myanmar. Approximately
500 bags are held here, before being loaded onto trucks and sent to
China, which is about 50 miles away. Photo by Nathan Siegel for
Mongabay.
However, he said all of it is used for domestic consumption.
That’s why, U Kyaw Zaw explained, the export of charcoal
made from wood is illegal, while it is legal to export charcoal
made from bamboo and sawdust.
The Forest Department could only provide a 1986 Notification
of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (No. 9/85) to
support this stance; and while the regulation imposes
considerable red tape to produce and sell charcoal, it doesn’t
explicitly forbid exports.

In Bhamo, a trader in a dark green sarong, known locally as
a longyi, and a white T-shirt welcomes us into his house.
While his young child rides a tricycle around a living room
furnished with a few plastic chairs, he explains that money
plays a key role in the illicit charcoal trade.
“To go to China from Myanmar, giving money is the major
solution,” he said. “Every truck [driver] has to give money to
different departments. Money can solve all the problems.” To
save a little, this trader hides the charcoal under bags of
corn, because the price of the bribe for corn is lower. He
would prefer to trade legally and allow the government to
collect taxes, and said he would make more money; but
instead the bribes are just “pocket money” for some officials,
he adds, while sliding an imaginary note into his breast
pocket.
Another trader in Bhamo, who asked to remain anonymous,
sits with a small group in front of a friend’s house. He angrily
tells Mongabay, “I want to burn all the officers, but we have
no choice, we have to go so we have to pay.” He explains the
process: “First we need to call the [army] officer in Zinlum
and ask if we can take our cargo up there. [Then] we need to
clear the route with payments here and there. If they tell us
not to come, we cannot go.” Once he gets the go-ahead, the
high-ranking officials tell the junior officers to accept the
payments.

Workers manage hundreds of charcoal bags stored in a lot in
Bhamo, Myanmar before they’re loaded onto trucks and bound for
China 50 miles away. Photo by Nathan Siegel for Mongabay.
Every ton of charcoal generates about $40 to $85 for corrupt
officials, according to estimates based on interviews with
four traders. Much of this will go to the high-ranking officials
at checkpoints called Zinlum and Chau sa Kakan. Officials
posted on the road between Myanmar and Dehong prefecture
in China’s Yunnan province pocket an estimated $1 million to
$10 million in bribes a year. The exact number is difficult to
pinpoint, given the fluid nature of bribes and other under-the-
table payments.
Myanmar’s army, which appears to be a regular beneficiary
of these bribes, did not respond to repeated requests for
comment regarding corruption allegations. The Forest
Department acknowledged “there may be involvement of our
staff, but if we find out those involvements, we will take
action.” Nevertheless, they declined to provide specific
details regarding sanctioned officials or even their numbers.
The drive from Bhamo to the border town of Lwegel takes
half a day on a bad road along steep hills. Once past the
checkpoints on the road out of Myanmar, it’s very easy to

enter into China illegally. Trucks take a muddy road that
bypasses the official customs post located just a few
hundred meters away.
After that, drivers say the trade is conducted in the open.
Trucks with Myanmar plates offload their freight in one of the
yards whose ground is black from the traffic and where
charcoal bags are piled over 10 meters high. This charcoal
will feed one of the silicon smelters in Dehong, and possibly
beyond.
Feeding China’s industrial appetite
Yunnan’s stunning forested hills help make it what Lonely
Planet calls “the trendiest destination for China’s exploding
domestic tourist industry.” The region has also been China’s
doorway to Burma since the ninth century when, in his
book Where China Meets India, the historian Thant Myint-U
writes, “A visiting troupe of musicians from Burma traveled
to the Tang court and performed songs entitled ‘The Victory
of the Ram’ and ‘The Peacock King’.”
A valley in Yunnan province, China, near the border with
Myanmar. Photo by Nathan Siegel for Mongabay.

The two countries didn’t just trade cultures. Thant Myint-U
describes how “when the border [between China and
Myanmar] first opened up in the 1980s, the first sign of the
new China was the flood of cheap Chinese goods.”
“The forests of Burma’s north and east were mercilessly
chopped down, with hundreds of lorries a day ferrying huge
teak and other hardwood logs to waiting Chinese sawmills,”
he wrote.
Since then, China has built slick roads to ensure the smooth
exchange of Myanmar’s natural resources for phones,
motorbikes and plastic wares.
Myanmar’s charcoal can be used for the production of two
types of materials: ferrosilicon and silicon metal. The first is
used in the production of stainless steel and other widely
used alloys. The second is used for aluminium alloys, as well
as the production of semiconductors for electronics,
photovoltaic cells for solar panels, and even cosmetics.
Both are produced through similar chemical reactions that
take place at an extremely high temperature, requiring cheap
electricity that’s supplied by Yunnan’s dams. Carbon, often
in the form of charcoal, is thrown into furnaces together with
mined silica ore to produce silicon metal. To produce
ferrosilicon, scrap iron is added to the mix.
China produces over two-thirds of the world’s ferrosilicon
and silicon metal, with around a quarter of it coming from the
province of Yunnan, especially from the prefecture of
Dehong, which neighbors Myanmar. Although other sources
of carbon can be used for the production of silicon, research
of international trade data and the environmental impacts of
Dehong’s smelters indicate they are primarily using charcoal.

In 2015, a Chinese NGO called the Tianjin Binhai
Environmental Advisory Service Center investigated the
pollution caused by Dehong’s silicon industry. It found that it
“has caused a serious damage to forest resources,” and
estimated that “119,700 tons of charcoal were consumed in
the production of industrial silicon in Dehong prefecture in
2014, which would [mean that] 8,000 hectares” – 31 square
miles – “of forests were cut down.”
In 2016, the industry consumed nearly twice that amount
(216,273 tons of charcoal) according to our estimates based
on figures provided by the Dehong Commission of Industry
and Information Technology (in the annexes of a report
available here).
Trucks like this are loaded with charcoal before it navigates the
small streets of Bhamo, Myanmar, as it starts the 50-mile drive to
China. Photo by Nathan Siegel for Mongabay.
To produce this amount, Dehong’s furnaces need over
14,000 soccer fields of forests to turn to charcoal every year.

But the prefecture’s own forests are in no real danger in this
regard.
Indeed, a substantial part, maybe all, of this charcoal comes
from Myanmar. Ding Jian, the president of a company
providing logistics services to smelters, said in an interview
with the media outlet Asian Metals that Myanmar’s “charcoal
resource supports the production of the high-grade silicon
metal in Yunnan.” A forward-looking 2016 report from the
Dehong State Bureau of Statistics suggests that because of
the crackdown on charcoal-making in the region, the
industry should “make full use of the advantages of overseas
[Myanmar’s] resources (electricity, silica mine and charcoal
etc.).”
Myanmar’s Forest Department told Mongabay there had been
no charcoal exports in recent years, and provided us with a
document that indicates that only 1,169 tons of charcoal had
been exported to China between 2004 and 2010. However,
over those years, China declared to the UN’s Comtrade
database that it had imported a total of over 330,000 tons of
charcoal from Myanmar. In 2016 alone, the most recent year,
China declared that it had imported over 30,000 tons of
charcoal from Myanmar. The real figure is likely much higher,
given the extent of the smuggling.
Mortgaging the forests of future generations
Myanmar timidly enforces its export ban on wood charcoal.
In 2016-2017, the Forest Department declared having stopped
a total of 91 vehicles transporting charcoal illegally. But only
nine of those were in the Sagaing region, where charcoal is
produced, and none in Kachin State, through which the
charcoal transits to China.

U Kyaw Zaw, of the Forest Department, said that charcoal
was not a priority because the illicit trade “is almost non-
existent. Because it is not of high value.” He added, “They
may smuggle timber, which is of high value and scarce in
their country.”
Yet the impact on Myanmar’s forests is real. Kevin Woods, a
researcher of Myanmar’s resource politics since the early
2000s, when presented with Mongabay’s findings, wrote in
an email that “while charcoal [has] less value per unit than
most commodities smuggled across the border, the
cumulative amount paid in bribes per annum is staggering.”
Over the phone, he explained that this production of charcoal
“would be like taking the house that you live in, and burning
it down [to charcoal] and selling it for firewood.” This
jeopardizes the livelihoods of future generations because
“you’re dramatically changing the ecology of the area you’re
in when you get rid of the forest.”
“The question is why are farmers chopping down their
village forest … in order to send charcoal to China? What is
the motivation behind that? What my research [mostly in
northern Shan State] has shown is that the wider economy is
in such shambles for farmers, who are getting further
squeezed off their lands.”
Even people involved in the charcoal trade are worried about
its impact on the forest. “If I could stop trading, I would like
to because the lands in Kachin State are destroyed and the
climate changes every year,” said one producer. But with
more and more lands given over to large-scale projects, such
as dams financed by Chinese companies, it’s likely that
they’ll have to keep cutting their trees and burning them.

Banner image: A local cools charcoal at a kiln near Katha,
Myanmar. This kiln takes seven days to produce 130 bags of
charcoal. Myo Htun, who owns the charcoal, will sell each
bag for $0.90 to traders in Bhamo, who will then transport it
to China. Photo by Nathan Siegel for Mongabay.
Emmanuel Freudenthal is an investigative reporter whose
work has appeared internationally and he can be found on
Twitter at @EmmanuelFreuden. Nathan Siegel is a
photographer and videographer focusing on international
environmental issues. He can be found on Instagram
at @npsiegel.
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do that at the bottom of the page.
Article published by Genevieve Belmaker
charcoal, Featured, Forests, Illegal
Logging, Logging, Rainforests, Tropical Forests

Burning Down the House Myanmar’s Destructive Charcoal Trade

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