Teak in Myanmar
Other notable areas of teak growth include the Arakan Mountains in the west of the country and the Shan Hills in the East.
After its victory in the First Anglo-Burmese War in 1826, Britain found in its newly conquered Burmese territory an ample source of teak.
This move was supposedly made to ensure the harvest and sale of sufficient wood, but in reality was a surrender by the government to well-connected timber merchants.
[10] This practice meant that the laborers who planted teak and tended crops would be strongly tied to the British colonial authorities, from whom they received salaries.
In addition to creating a British presence in the lives of locals, taungya was quickly taken up due to being cheaper than the creation of teak plantations.
[11] Early efforts to introduce taungya to Burmese teak productions started in the Pegu Hills, between the Irrawaddy and Sittaung rivers in central Burma.
The people that the British imagined would implement their taungya system of teak cultivation were ethnic Karens who had been residents of the region for generations without incorporation into the lowland Burman culture.
[14] In addition to opposing it for the political power it gave the British, they found the practice of a form of agriculture unpracticed by their fore-bearers culturally threatening.
[15] While the taungya system of simultaneously growing teak and other crops was espoused by the British, shifting cultivation was and has remained the norm in Burma.
However, some scholars find this assessment to be flawed given the political independence that it gave to its practitioners [16] While the taungya system did entail shifting cultivation, it ran counter to the goals of the Karen.
Taungya also meant that the British or their agents would return to the previously cut areas after some years to harvest the newly planted teak.
Due to the wide distribution of teak in the Pegu Hills, almost any location that a Karen farmer could choose to clear would contain some trees.
At this point, the colonial government, tired of Karen resistance, began to make deals with villages promising them plots of land for permanent cultivation in return for their labor in the taungya system.
These same people came to feel left in the lurch when the British Government began to shift its focus to cheaper and less labor-intensive methods of teak extraction in Upper Burma.
[23] In the twentieth century, private enterprise, which had been discouraged since the disaster in the Tenasserim region, was allowed back into the teak trade.
This is evidenced by several failed attempts by Burmese politicians to change British forestry policy with respect to teak and other woods.
One of the effects of the enclosure policies that the Forestry Department had adopted was that local villagers were no longer allowed to cut their own firewood for free, as they had for generations.
Burmese nationalist politicians attempted to convince the colonial Legislative Council of Burma to expand local's rights to free forest products in 1926.
[36] To make up for decreased rice exports, the State Timber Board encouraged greatly increasing teak production.
In need of money to purchase military equipment in case of more uprisings like the one that led to deposition of Ne Win, the government had little choice but to cut more and more teak.
[40] Neighboring Thailand had been not regulated teak extraction as robustly as Burma or its British rulers, and by 1988 suffered from major deforestation.
Thai timber companies no longer had sources of teak within their own country and needed new resources to exploit to stay viable.
[41] The state in Myanmar responded by selling them permission to log in territory controlled by the militant Karen National Union (KNU).
The KNU was a longtime antagonist of the Myanma state that had been able to thrive due to its inaccessible location near the Thai border, as well as its connections to cross-border smuggling.
