Outrage, forest cover and people

Logging is a can of worms, not unlike mining, in the Philippines. Where logging is concerned, society holds a general attitude of pity for the poor not well focused nor directed. The need for the poor to have a livelihood in the uplands is put forth as an acceptable justification for the continued mismanagement. The poor are exploited in this process without gaining responsible access to neither upland resources nor the basic service to improve their situation. Where these people are migrants from the lowlands, it cannot be assumed they are knowledgeable of forest management.

All the while, urban life continues, ignorant and clueless of a trading system that is of its own making. The poor do not need pity; they need help to face the changes in their lives, in their livelihoods, in their landscapes.

Officials who violate the law need to be charged and removed without offhandedly condemning all officials of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources and the Philippine National Police, whose staff do put their lives at risk while others on "tseke"- points and up the line make unscrupulous profit. It was most demoralizing to hear in Infanta of recent reports that while some make legitimate livelihood out of turning debris in the rivers into charcoal, others up the slope with financial and local government official backers are cutting fresh trees in the Agos River.

Regeneration is very slow in areas exposed to forest extraction and where grasses like Imperata have a hold. Such grass slopes, like the area from Gabaldon down to Dingalan, were cleared a long time ago and lost all soil. As a result, these areas showed no landslides during the disaster but only ‘slumpage' of decades gone by. There is limited loss of forest cover in the last 15 years as shown by remote sensing analysis but the data sets cannot be critical compared as are from different sources. There are both areas of regeneration and extraction, while overall loss is estimated to be 1 to 3% primary cover and 3 to 5% secondary cover between 1987 and 2002.

It is one thing to say that stopping logging will stop flooding like the disaster in Infanta - because it will not! The primary actions to be taken are the relocation of those in high-risk areas; a serious review of what infrastructure will withstand a hundred-year event and a critical review of land allocation in the lowlands and uplands. However, it is another thing to excuse or ignore such logging as "it does not matter anyway." There is no area along the eastern Sierra Madre where logging occurred without severe erosion and landslides. The chances of these areas regenerating with natural forest even in 100 years are very limited unless actively engaged upon. Sustainable forest management can in no way support logging in such areas. If we have not learnt that logging should be stopped in the Sierra Madre, and this includes licensed logging, in the face of direct hits by typhoons in this area, then there are no lessons we can learn.

The logic of logging today in Samar Island to the south, already acknowledged nationally and internationally as a natural park with extremely high biodiversity, seems also to lose sight of the Pacific Ocean, which the island faces in the same way as Aurora and Quezon. This ocean is not pacific toward the Philippines. Given the unstable rock formation in Samar of limestone and underlying rock layers that easily give way, who will take responsibility for the towns of Can-avid, Dolores, Oris and towns along Catubig River that in 1989 were washed out by heavy rains and debris? The fact that the forest cannot retain the rains does not justify logging; neither does it justify ignoring the needed risk reduction in these towns where the riverbanks, if not beds, are occupied by poor people. Is the wealth of knowledge only to be used for argumentation and discourse, and not for action that focuses clearly on the needed responses?

Current national discussions on Samar and other forest and biodiversity-rich areas similarly situated highlight the problem. Policy integration is poor, policy interpretation is abused by sticking to the letter while the spirit of our laws does not allow for the present interpretation and implementation of logging rights. Policy consistency and political will are at the core of the problem and the leadership must bring us through this.

Internationally, research institutions and corporations are seeking for more sustainable resource extraction and the development of accompanying comprehensive policies with governments. However, the Philippines continues to prove that resource extraction industries, even when given rights under the most difficult times, likewise continue to fail to deliver the proper management and application of stringent technical overseeing. Equally, the policies developed do not result in a rational implementation and interpretation as shown by the Samar situation. The political framework becomes too accommodating to the economic demands, diluting and weakening the social development basis by which these investments in extractive industries were negotiated. The credibility of the entire natural resource business world and the stability of the environment are put at risk when resource mismanagement continues to the point of legal or illegal extraction of all commercially useable forest in a country that is over 50% sloping forestland. Increasingly, we are creating disasters that are avoidable.

The strength of what can be done is in capacitating local government to work with and serve its people, in engaging with national government where it shows a level of accountability, and doing this with the support of responsible business.

This also calls for an experiential shift where we all view the problem from the local geographic perspective of sitting in the valley bottom or delta where "we as a family have, with or without other options, built our house and government has assisted us indirectly with an infrastructure that is not designed to respond to the impact of long term rainfall events. But for those of us who survived, everything has been washed away, so where do we go?"

If the arguments and the present discourse persist on focusing on the problem of logging in the country (which is by itself a problem and another form of disaster), and not see the primary cause in the Aurora-Quezon-Nueva Ecija tragedy, our attention is diverted to the wrong response. In these areas the immediate, mid- and long-term problem revolves around settlement security and adapted infrastructure design and implementation. With this as the premise and guiding reality for change, it can be acknowledged that forest management does have a role, as does the impact of the social irresponsibility and abuses of logging in addressing the problems of flood zones.