China’s Fungal Treasure: How the Wild Mushroom Trade is Shaping Politics in Southwest China

Since the 1980s, the trade in one of the world’s most valuable wild fungi, the matsutake mushroom, has fostered tremendous social change for people in Yunnan who live in its habitat. This is a mushroom that, to date, has never been successfully cultivated. In this talk I show how the matsutake economy is affecting ethnic minority communities, including Yi and Tibetan peoples, some of whom have gotten rid of their grazing animals such as goats and yaks to commit themselves to the trade. After the flooding in 1999 of China’s main river, the Yangtze, the government instituted a logging ban over a vast area, a policy that inadvertently pushed more people towards matsutake and away from pastoralism.