The injustice of digging in the forest

(Baonghean.vn) - The hobby of playing with wild peach trees has become popular nowadays as social life is increasingly developing. From the mountains to the city, every family wants to find a beautiful wild peach branch that is affordable. Is that why the exploiters are massively cutting down wild peach trees to sell? How unfair!

14 years ago, my house on the other side of the Lam River moved to Highway 7 running from Vinh to Nam Can border gate (Ky Son). Every time the Lunar New Year approaches, I sit with some motorbike taxi drivers on the side of the road, watching the trucks carrying wild peach blossoms from above and exclaiming: “Oh my! Where do the peach blossoms come from that keep being carried from one truck to another? At this rate, there will probably be no more peach branches as small as a little finger left.”

Yet strangely, 14 years have passed, and every year at this time, we sit on the side of the road to watch the trucks carrying moss-covered peach blossoms hurrying downstream. Sometimes, there are even more of them than before. Cars and motorbikes run continuously until the last day of December. The same questions, year after year, and then it seems like everyone knows the answer but no one says it.

Forest digging trips during Tet are still coming in droves. Photo: Dao Tho

After graduating, I was lucky to live near famous places for wild peach blossoms in Nghe An. Every year, near the end of December, we would choose beautiful wild peach branches to bring home for Tet. That said, it was very difficult to get the peach branches to bring home. The honest and simple Mong people told me: "Just go to my father's field and choose, I will sell them cheap."

It took us nearly 2 hours to climb to the peach garden. To choose a peach branch, we had to ask the locals to bring it to us. It was extremely hard work. More than 10 years ago, the road to where we worked was just a dirt road, cars could not reach the place, so the peach gardens were planted mainly for the fruit. Peach trees were everywhere on the fields, blooming bright red flowers all over the hill. The peach branches absorbed the cold air of the highlands and became covered with moss from the base to the top. Every year, when they were cut down, people planted many new seedlings so that 3-4 years later they would bear fruit. This peach variety was also strange, sometimes without planting, the seedlings would just grow on the fields.

People transport wild peach blossoms to town to sell on the last day of the year. Photo: Dao Tho

When the asphalt road was spread throughout the mountainous district of Ky Son, trucks and motorbikes ran day and night to buy peach branches from the people and bring them to the lowlands to sell. At this time, the peach trees on the fields showed their value. They bore fruit in the summer and flowers in the spring. And the people in the highlands therefore had more income from their peach fields.

On a business trip at the end of the year, I met a local named Tho Nhenh Thong in Nam Can commune (Ky Son). Around Nhenh Thong's house and on his fields, peach trees were planted. He said that in the past, in the Mong villages, peach trees grew strongly but no one knew how to take advantage of that strength to develop the economy, but simply to get the fruit to eat.

Wild peach branches covered with moss are popular with buyers. Photo: Dao Tho

Realizing that every year at the end of Tet, people in the lowlands often go to the border to get peach trees to celebrate Tet, so in 2007, he planted more than 1,000 peach trees. Every year, he fertilized and pruned the branches so the peach trees grew quickly. After 5 years, the peach trees he planted were effective. Every Tet, he earned an average income of over 60 million VND from selling peach trees. After selling, he continued to plant peach trees every year to supply people in the lowlands.

To have a beautiful wild peach tree, every year the people of Nghe An highlands have to plant and take care of it very carefully. Photo: Dao Tho

He also did not expect that people would like to play with the mossy peach tree grown in the forest so much. But never mind, for a person like him, the peach tree has provided his family with an additional source of income, which is good enough. I wondered: "So you think this type of peach tree is a natural peach tree growing in the forest?" He laughed heartily: "Do you think fruit trees are like sa mu or po mu trees? It's just that it has been grown for many years in the fields, so people keep calling it wild peach. If it were natural, each beautiful branch could be sold for ten million, then surely our villagers would have given up all their housework to go get peach trees."

So, the questions that had been lingering in my mind for so long have now been resolved. As social life develops more and more, people have different interests. Some people like to play with ancient kumquat trees, ancient apricot trees… while others like to play with wild peach trees. That is the natural course of life.

A branch of wild peach blossom is displayed in a house during Tet in the lowlands. Photo: Dao Tho

For Mong people like Tho Nhenh Thong, phrases like “climate change”, “environmental pollution”, “ecological imbalance”… are strange. They only understand that the government has said that deforestation is a violation of the law, so they should not cut down trees anymore, but the government encourages us to grow peach trees for sale. The money we earn from the fields is also very hard-earned.

That said, it is understandable that many people feel impatient when seeing hundreds of trucks carrying peach blossoms from the highlands. Just like me before, when Tet comes, seeing trucks carrying peach blossoms passing by, I wonder: “Where do peaches come from that they carry so much year after year, at this rate year after year…” That’s it, and now I can answer that peaches are grown in the forest and sold there./.

Dao Tho