Text Box: Destruction and Degradation of the Burmese Frontier Forests
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Text Box: logs over the baby fruit trees so the villager's gardens were destroyed. Some loggers stole the villagers' fruit trees, betel nut and betel pepper vine. They also cut down the wood that the villagers keep in the garden to shade their gardens. 
When unauthorized logging started with bullock carts, loggers burned the rotational farms of the villagers in Soiloh. For example two loggers burned Naw Ku Ku Paw 's rotational farm in the afternoon of March 18, 2003. She has to clear another plot in the forest to get enough rice for next year. It wastes her energy.


Civil war

Logging and political conflict are interrelated in this area. Almost all villagers in Toungoo district were forcibly relocated to the military camps many times from 1975 to 2003. 52 villages of Tantibin Township have been forcibly relocated to the SPDC concentration camps near the military camps. “In 2000, my village was burned by the SPDC army Light Infantry Battalion 39 and we were forced to move thirteen miles to a concentration camp near the SPDC army camp” said a villager in Soiloh. Villagers in the concentration camp are restricted in their movements by the SPDC and cannot come back to work in their garden. The villagers have to abandon their villages, their orchard gardens, and their rotational farming areas. Some of them follow the orders and go to the concentration camps, but some of them hide in the deep forest. Both the relocated people and displaced people cannot practice their traditional livelihoods anymore. Most of them became shifting cultivators, but some of them became casual labourers in logging or mining. They are afraid to return to work in their villages because SPDC troops will shoot them on sight.  
In the concentration camps, villagers have to do forced labor. For example, the SPDC ordered around one hundred villagers of Klerlah village to clean the bushes along the dusty truck road in the frontline from Kawthinder to Buhsar Kee. A thirteen-year-old boy in Mawpader village said: “I have to carry my own food to go clean the SPDC Kler La-Mokchie truck road. I am very afraid of the landmines because I heard that some porters were injured and died because of the landmines.”
 In March 2003, the SPDC built a new camp near Kerserdoh village. The SPDC troops demanded food, made villagers from Kerserdoh, Hteeloh, Yinsha, Shansiboe, Zeepyugoon, and Tawgon do forced labor, and tortured some villagers. Moreover, villagers in the concentration camp also have to pay porter fees and have to pay for security at night. One villager said “I have to pay 100 Kyat per month for nighttime security.” Another villager stated: “I have to pay 500 Kyat per month to the SPDC for porter fees.” One of the villagers in Soiloh said that before his village was burned he had to pay 2,500-5000 Kyat per month to the SPDC for porter fees. Flat paddy farmers have to sell their rice, 12 basket of rice per 1 acre. The SPDC pays the villagers only 300 Kyat per basket, while the market price is 1500 Kyat. For this reason, many farmers don't have enough rice to survive and have to do logging to get extra money.
The SPDC also sets a curfew for the villagers and limits the time they can spend outside the camp. “I have to pay 100 Kyat per month for a pass to work outside” said a villager in Soiloh who is now staying in a concentration camp. Food in the concentration camps is scarce. Some become casual labourers; others practice shifting cultivation or set up short term vegetable gardens. Curfew, forced labor, requisitioning of food and supplies, unofficial taxes, torture, and extra judicial killing makes the villagers stay in fear and has changed the villagers’ traditional livelihoods. 

Many internally displaced people have fled into the deep forest on the mountains of Tantibin Township. These internally displaced people have practiced shifting cultivation since 1975, so a lot of old growth forests have been destroyed. Since 1992, to now, the villagers of 25 villages near the Kawthinder-Text Box: KESAN forestry campaign