When His Majesty the IVth Druk Gyalpo banned the harvesting of timber from our forests in 1979, I was the man about town to implement the ban. I was the head honcho at the Export Section of the Export Division of the Ministry of Trade, Industries and Forests. My section was charged with the responsibility to dispose off the timber logs/sawn lumber that became available when the ban came into effect. That year, sawn Blue Pine (Pinus wallichiana) blocks were sold across the border in Jaigaon at Nu.72.00 per cubic foot. The price for the same timber is currently fixed by the government at Nu.340.50 per cft.
Pile of Pine logs ready for the export market. The above stock photo shows the lumber from a well-managed forest stand - the boles are clean, even sized and pencil-straight. By comparison, our lumber would look severely gnarled and grotesque - through overstocking and lack of management, such as thinning.
Strangely, close to half a century since, there prevails a misconception that the act of banning the harvesting of timber from our forests was a conservation initiative. IT WAS NOT! In fact the term we employed those days was NOT ban – we knew it as “Nationalization of Timber”.
It was necessitated as a consequence of the wanton destruction caused to our forests - by the private logging contractors of the era, and as a result of the total irresponsibility and corruption among the custodians of our forests – the Department of Forests.
For the record – most of today’s rich and the upwardly mobile have their humble beginnings in timber and timber trade.
Another one for the record: when nationalization was contemplated to be implemented, the Department of Forests reported to the government that there may be about 30,000 cft. of sawn timber and logs in the hands of the private operators in the Western region - there was no NRDCL then. That grossly erroneous quantity was perceived to be a manageable quantity and thus the Export Division was charged with the responsibility to dispose off the stocks. We prepared to receive the nationalized timbers at a stockyard in Phuentsholing.
However, when finally the nationalized lumber started to arrive at Phuentsholing, the volume amounted to many hundred thousand cubic feet of timber - it was so overwhelming that the entire Phuentsholing Industrial Estate could not accommodate the stock. We created another stockyard above the Estate – that was not enough either. We then hired the open spaces around Norgay Cinema Hall – even that proved to be insufficient.
The problem was not limited to space to accommodate the illegal timbers – transporting them from the production centers in Thimphu, Haa and Paro to our stockyard in Phuentsholing was a bigger hurdle.
The problem: the whole of Bhutan did not have enough trucks capable of transporting the stock of timber that became available.
You can imagine the scale of corruption that may have existed then! The stock of illegal timbers that were held by the private operators was few hundred folds in excess of the official figure that the Department of Forests presented to the government.
There was no way we were going to be able to transport all the timbers that became available - the country did not have the carrying capacity. Thus, for the first and last time in the history of Bhutan - we opted to transport the timbers through the riverine route - we resorted to floating the timbers over and down the Wangchhu river! Bhutan imported skilled manpower from Jammu in North India for the job.
The ensuing disaster is another story to be told another day.
Timber – whether sawn or in log form is a perishable commodity – thus they need to be sold off in time before the rot sets in. But selling few hundred thousand cubic feet of timber - at one go - posed a danger of a different kind. Unfortunately, the rules in place then did not allow us to engage in direct selling. We proposed that we be allowed to sell through direct negotiations with select Indian importers, to enable us to maintain a level of price that we wanted. Our Ministry did not permit it - we were ordered to take the designated route - sale through auction. His Royal Highness, then the Trade Minister preferred to protect us: he preferred to spare us the axe of the Royal Audit - over the risk of lower prices for our stock of timber.
We finally fixed the minimum bid prices, and put the timbers on auction in Phuentsholing.
The ensuing disaster is yet another story to be told another day.
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