Under Siege

India's demand for teak wood is endangering Ecuador's rainforests and agricultural land ISHAN KUKRETI | New Delhi

 

- Ishan Kukreti

ECUADOR IS witnessing an invasion. The aggressor is gaining land at a rapid pace, damaging the Latin American country’s flora and fauna diversity. And India is fuelling this takeover, though in an indirect way.

The invader is teak and India’s appetite for teak wood is the reason behind the spread of the tree in Ecuador. The process started in 2013, when Myanmar, which was India’s top source of teak (Tectona grandis), banned felling of the tree. Ecuador filled the vacuum and is now exporting 95 per cent of its teak wood to India, states Ecuador’s environment ministry data. The country’s teak export to India has seen a 50 per cent spike since 2012-13. According to Xavier Elizalde, executive director of the Ecuadorian Association of Producers of Teak and Tropical Timber, Ecuador is making a profit of $30 million a year from teak export.

However, teak is not native to Ecuador and is exhibiting invasive behaviour to survive. The tree grows fast—is ready to be cut in six to eight years—and regrows at least six times if the main root is not damaged. It is difficult to uproot because the main root runs 6 m underground, drawing more than its share of water and minerals. What’s worse, because teak is a non-native, there are no natural agents to quickly decompose its leaves. “Since teak came, nothing else grows. Cotton, tomatoes, nothing,” says Hacienda Vera, a teak farmer of Guayas province. And the growth in teak plantations has caused deforestation and loss of agricultural land. According to Global Forest Watch, an initiative by the World Resources Institute to monitor forests across the world, Ecuador lost about 0.4 million ha tree cover between 2001 and 2015. About 30 per cent of this loss (0.18 million ha) was between 2012 and 2015. How much of this is due to spread of teak is yet to be studied, but trends point at teak.