Recently, a large number of people living in Dong Nai province have rushed to collect dry teak leaves in the forest between Dinh Quan and Tan Phu districts to sell to traders, a district official confirmed.
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Recently, a large number of people living in Dong Nai province have rushed to collect dry teak leaves in the forest between Dinh Quan and Tan Phu districts to sell to traders, a district official confirmed.
The number of ‘collectors’ increases rapidly on a daily basis, and they have even divided themselves into groups of up to 30 people, he added.
“We are paid VND110,000 (US$5.26) a day if we manage to collect 50 kilogram of leaves,” said Le Quang Thoai, from Tan Phu district.
Most of the leaf hunters have flocked to the 150-hectare teak forest managed by the La Nga Agriculture Seed Center.
The leaves were then brought to a secret facility in the district for packaging. Locals said they only collected the leaves and sold them to traders. They do not know who the buyers are and what they plan to do with the leaves.
“This is an unprecedented and unusual phenomenon in the locality,” a Dinh Quan district top official commented.
Dong Nai Department of Agriculture and Rural Development announced that the leaves are being collected for a company in Ho Chi Minh City, which will use them to produce fertilizer.
“There is no clause in the forest protection regulation mentioning leaf collection,” admitted an official from the Dong Nai Forest Management Agency.
In late November 2012, many locals in Dinh Quan District also scrambled to collect dry cashew leaves to sell to unknown traders at significant prices.
Another similar phenomenon occurred in 2011 in the northern province of Bac Giang, when litchi leaves became prized products.
In December of that year, Luc Ngan District in Bac Giang was busily trading dry litchi leaves, rather than the locality’s nationally-popular litchi fruits.
The dry leaves were sold to local traders hired by a company based in Hanoi, whose purpose in buying the leaves remains a mystery to both traders and farmers.
(Source: TTNews)
