Hacking at a bamboo plant with a machete, Avayi Vayayana peels back the shoot’s stiff bark and scans southern Taiwan’s mountains, anxious for more of the money-making crop his indigenous people increasingly struggle to find.
Generations of Tsou people have lived off Alishan’s (阿里山) bamboo forests, which were planted by Vayayana’s ancestors and are typically harvested in April and May, he said.
However, “the weather over the past few years has really been out of whack,” said Vayayana, a 62-year-old tribal chief.
Photo: AFP
“The rainfall has been delayed and the bamboo shoots’ growth is noticeably affected,” he said.
In the indigenous village of Tefuye (特富野), the dark-brown cones of the stone bamboo — or Phyllostachys lithophila — have become harder to spot.
“The little young shoots will not sprout if there’s no rain. After a while, they will die inside the ground,” Vayayana said.
Photo: AFP
The rains from February to April are crucial to the growth of bamboo shoots — which are popular in Taiwanese cuisine — but since the end of last year, there have not been any significant downpours.
The Tsou have a population of 7,000 in Alishan, and their bamboo-shoot harvest has been steadily declining.
On a misty morning last month, a welcome drizzle finally blanketed the bamboo forest Vayayana works in, but he said it is too late.
This year, his haul is one-third of last year’s harvest.
Worse, Vayayana and his family have to contend with crop-raiding monkeys, he said after an airgun shot rang out in the distance.
It was his cousin trying to scare away the marauders, he said.
“Because many surrounding bamboo forests have died, now where there are bamboo shoots, all the monkeys will go,” he said.
Southern Taiwan has experienced its worst drought in decades. Water levels in the Zengwen Reservoir (曾文水庫) serving Tainan and Chiayi counties plummeted below 10 percent this year, the third such drop since 2018, leaving reservoir beds cracked and exposed.
The Zengwen Reservoir serves as a primary water source for a massive foundry that makes the nation’s precious semiconductors — soaring in demand globally — and also supplements the region’s rice-growing plains.
However, for the third year in a row, the government is providing subsidies to farmers to not plant crops — a sign of the severe water needs.
An hour’s drive from the reservoir, Alishan is experiencing drastic weather changes. From January to April, rainfall declined to 226.5mm, a more than 50 percent drop compared with the same period a year earlier, the Central Weather Bureau said.
For the Tsou — whose lifestyle is entwined with nature — the effect is “comprehensive,” Greenpeace climate and energy campaign director Lena Chang (張皪心) said.
“They are the frontline victims of climate change,” Chang said.
Data compiled by Greenpeace show the decline in rain to be persistent. In the past three decades, Alishan has lost an average of 2.6mm of rainfall per year in February and 1.2mm in March — a vital period for bamboo-shoot growth.
At Tefuye’s crop collection point, villagers offload sacks of bamboo shoots from trucks, weighing them before sending them to factories to be boiled and tinned for consumption.
“This year, the rain came too late and many bamboo trees are sick. The harvest is very bad,” said Voyu Baniana, 24.
“In my family’s plantation, we have none. I can only work for other people this year,” Baniana said.
Those who returned to their villages after working in cities are finding it harder to live off crops they grew up cultivating.
Voyo Yulunana, 43, still remembers the days he spent as a child harvesting bamboo shoots, the sale of which supported the community’s living standards.
“Buying a car or building a house, we counted on the bamboo,” he said.
Since Yulunana returned from a brief stint in the city working in construction, he has noticed “the rains don’t come when they should.”
However, his grandfather made a switch to growing coffee beans, which Yulunana and other younger Tsou have shifted toward over the past decade.
“Coffee is slowly replacing bamboo shoots as the cash crop” in Alishan, Yulunana said.
However, even coffee is not immune to climate change — a late spring rain affects the plant’s flowering season, and the erratic weather last year nearly devastated his family’s 400-shrub crop, he said.
“At this point, I can get by with just growing coffee,” Yulunana said. “Who knows what new crops will appear after coffee.”
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