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INBAR's annual "amazing" tour to China's major bamboo industries
"I leaned how bamboo flooring is produced and how to recognize good and bad bamboo materials for flooring mats. I bought a bamboo fibre T-shirt and bamboo slippers, I saw a lot of beautiful bamboo handicrafts and furniture, we ate fresh bamboo shoots cooked in different ways, we drank bamboo beer.....bamboo is an excellent plant, this is really an amazing tour" said Mr. Netondo Godfrey Wafula, a Kenyan university professor, of INBAR's China 2009 Bamboo & NTFPs Tour in April this year.
This annually-run tour aims to raise awareness of the importance of bamboo as a Non-Timber Forest Product and inspire them to promote industrial development of the bamboo sector in their own countries. Twenty-two participants from 11 countries (Brazil, Britain, Canada, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Italy, Kenya, Malaysia, the Philippines and the U.S.A.) joined the tour and saw the achievements of Chinese bamboo-based development over the last 30 years. Previous attendees have shared their experiences when back in their own countries – in 2007 a Malaysian attendee from Sarawak invited a Chinese trainer he had met to train local artisans so they could set up bamboo businesses, whilst the former State Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development of Ethiopia, who joined the 2007 tour, is now head of the Benishangul-Gumuz region of Ethiopia, and actively promoting bamboo-based development there.
Zhejiang province is situated on the shore of the East China Sea, and has about thirty genera and four hundred varieties of bamboos. The many thousands of bamboo products made there are sold all around the world, with an annual output of RMB 25 billion Yuan (3.7 billion USD) in 2008, a quarter of China bamboo industry's total income.
The group visited Hangzhou Dasso Bamboo Floor Co. Ltd which produced the fire-proof bamboo ceiling in Madrid international airport that won the 2006 Sterling prize. Dasso also produces bamboo veneer for the interior of BMW cars, and wind turbine blades. The group visited factories producing bamboo flooring and panels, processing shoots and making window blinds, as well as Zhejiang Forestry College, the biggest bamboo garden in the world at Anji Bamboo Garden, China Bamboo Museum and the first China Bamboo Charcoal Museum.
After visiting the Anji Bamboo Exhibit Museum, Timothy Fisher, an American participant said, "These bamboo handicrafts are amazing, in America we seldom see these kinds of products, they would be very popular in the American market". Government officials from Malaysia expressed their eagerness to learn from the Chinese bamboo experience to promote bamboo industry development in their own country and invited bamboo enterprises to corporate with Malaysian companies.
After the visits in Zhejiang the group departed for Chengdu in Sichuan province. Sichuan has 154 economic bamboo species and 340,000 hectares of economic bamboo forest, and its bamboo industry development potential is huge. The group visited the demonstration site of the prefabricated bamboo modular emergency houses in Dujiangyan which was built with CFC funding under the supervision of INBAR, and the Sustainable Bamboo Enterprise Program (implemented by INBAR and funded by Citi China Co. Ltd) which aims to help local communities affected by the earthquake develop new income generating opportunities. The group also visited Qingsheng Yunhua bamboo handicraft training base, one of INBAR's project partners in the region, and a bamboo pulp and paper company.
Another tour will be run in 2010, and a second may be run this year depending on demand. For details, please contact jfu@inbar.int
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