The Hindu Business Line : APFDC plans to raise red sanders as plantation crop

FOR years red sanders, unique to the forest areas of Cuddapah, Chittoor and Nellore districts in Andhra Pradesh, has been the much sought after wood by illegal traders, who smuggled it to distant lands, especially Japan.

Now through the sustained efforts of the Andhra Pradesh State Forest Department, there is hope of it being raised as a plantation species.

Efforts were on to raise nurseries of this species and promote plantations in the near future, said Dr K. Ramakrishna Rao, General Manger of the Andhra Pradesh Forest Development Corporation (APFDC), under the Forest Department.

Simultaneously, research initiatives are under way to exploit its potential application in soaps, dyes, toys etc. Despite a ban on exploitation and sale, good quality red sanders fetched any price between Rs 3 lakh and Rs 4 lakh per tonne in the global market, while the inferior type was sold as fuel wood like other timbers, he told Business Line.

Red sanders is endemic to only these three districts and is a slow-growing tree. If raised as a plantation crop, the quality of the wood is not often good. Therefore more efforts were needed and the forest department was at it, he said. The demand for red sanders exists in Japan and 40 other countries.

Since regular harvest of red sanders has been banned several years ago, the illegal felling and smuggling have occurred periodically. The State Government's agencies have seized large quantities of wood from smugglers. Such seizures over the past decade have yielded nearly 1,800 tonnes of the material, for which the FDC has been appointed by the State Government as the main selling agent.

The Corporation segregates and sells the material in the global market. Interestingly, Japan alone has procured 200 tonnes in recent times. Red sanders was used in Japan mainly for making musical instruments, he said.

It is estimated that it grows in about 50,000 hectares of forest area in the three districts. With the potential for using red sanders as an important input in the manufacture of agarbathis, as a natural dye (research is even on in Germany and France),and in the toy industry, efforts to make it a plantation crop are, indeed, promising.

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