Daotangqing village, administered by Mengyang town, was set to be the first field of experimentation. It is sitting close to the core activity area of wild Asian elephant, with at least 20 of them living within a radius of 5 km.
The villagers' livelihoods used to mainly rely on rubber farming, which generated a relatively low annual per capita income of around 7,000 yuan. Wang Shaokuan, 23, a villager from Daotangqing, recalls that he needed to go into the rubber forests at midnight to reap the crop, and then go back at 7 or 8 o'clock in the morning to collect it; and all his work could be ruined by bad weather, such as a sudden rain.
Besides these hazards, there was also the problem of market saturation.
According to IFAW, the area under rubber cultivation in Yunnan province has grown rapidly since 2000, once a viable strategy for development as the price of dry rubber exceeded 30,000 yuan per metric ton; however, many Southeast Asian countries have also engaged in the large-scale planting of rubber, causing an oversupply in recent years.
