Deforestation, Hunting Devouring Laotian Environment - AP

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Long spared the depredations that scarred neighboring Vietnam, Thailand, and China, Laos' 5.6 million people still enjoy a high ratio of water and forest resources, including 800 bird and 100 mammal species, ranging from tigers to the recently discovered giant muntjack and saola.

But conservationists are alarmed at what has been eradicated in less than a generation. They fear that minimal environmental programs run by creaky Communist Party machinery, riddled with corruption and supported by limited foreign aid, has no chance to slow the destruction. They argue that short-term profits from profligate logging and other ventures will be a disaster in the long run.

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Traveling the 450-kilometer (280-mile) length of National Highway 13, which runs north-south through the heart of Laos, the only patches of viable forest are inside ravines or on mountain slopes too steep to log. During the dry season, smoke from woodlands cleared for farming cast a hazy shroud. Forest cover has shrunk from 70 percent of Laos' total area in the middle of the 20th century to less than 40 percent today — and possibly far lower, environmentalists say. Many woodlands are described as "dead" due to over-hunting.

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But experts say traditional local consumption isn't the real threat to wildlife and woods, at least over the next two decades. "The illegal trade to China is the major danger, as it is to all the adjacent countries," author Gordon Claridge said of the Chinese appetite for everything from turtles to tigers. "Whenever there are in-depth studies of trade in a particular wildlife group, it seems that China comes up as the major destination."

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http://www.enn.com/news/2004-02-11/s_13009.asp