“A person without children would face a hopeless future; a country without trees is almost as helpless.” – Theodor Roosevelt, American president
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“I was a shabu (crack or poor man’s cocaine) dealer for six years,” admitted Bagut, who’s from Agusan del Sur. “I was also in prison and even there, shabu dealing continued. I operated here in the Agusan marsh area. But I realized that it was almost like killing people and their families as well, even with all the money I earned.
“I did not realize that I was killing them, I just sold shabu so I can have money, but I never knew that I was also killing their families. It really has a great effect, it shouldn’t have been my business. I promised myself then that I would not do anything that harmed other people, so I shifted to chainsawing.”
Bagut is one of the 53 people featured in the book, Forest Faces: Hopes and Regrets in Philippine Forestry, published jointly by the regional office of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and Environmental Science for Social Change (ESSC).
“It’s been two years since I stopped (selling shabu) and I went into the chainsaw business last year,” he said. “I have expanded and I have a mini-sawmill and a bandsaw now. But what I am doing is illegal because I don’t pay forest charges, I have no permit, I have no license. But that’s only where I am illegal, because of the government and what it requires of me.
“But my work with people is legal,” he continued, “because this is how they source what they need to be able to eat. I may be illegal now, but I’m not harming anyone. I keep people alive, and I’m providing a livelihood to people.”
Farmers who live around three kilometers away from his mini-sawmill supply him the wood, mostly lauan. “They got their wood from their kaingin areas,” Bagut was quoted as saying in the book. “They cut the trees so they can plant rubber. This is what we call salvaging, this is the purpose for cutting the trees and then they will plant rubber trees after. I don’t tell them to cut the trees so that I can buy their wood; this is theirs, they are cutting down the trees so they can plant rubber. Sometimes, they also plant falcatta, but it is mainly rubber.”
Bagut doesn’t choose any kind of wood as long it’s not rotten. He sells the woods mostly for house construction. When asked if he is damaging the forest because of his business, he replied negatively by saying, “I do not disturb the forest.”
Bagut also supplies for free the coffin demand in the municipality where his sawmill is located. He doesn’t make the coffin himself but just supply the wood needed. “The coffins cost around P5,500 but I donate this to the town for free,” he said. “That’s my contribution. So even if I don’t have a permit nor a license for my business, my work is needed. And I don’t abuse.”
“Today’s degraded forest reflect a history of logging and abandonment,” wrote Peter Walpole, ESSC’s executive director, in his introductory of the 242-page book, which is full of photos and quotable quotes.
“A forest is more than just trees,” said the late scientist Dr. Dioscoro L. Umali, who received a Ramon Magsaysay Award in 19 for public service. “It is a community throbbing with life – an ecosystem of plants, animals and their surroundings; an all-embracing web of life woven into soil, water, and air. These elements interact with each other. All are essential parts of a whole system.”
Umali said that tampering any one of these elements disrupts the balance of ecosystem. “In nature,” he pointed out, “there are no rewards and punishment; there are only consequences.”
So, where have all our forests gone?
The first nationwide forest inventory was completed in 1969 and only 10.4 million hectares of forest were left out of the 17 million hectares that used to occupy the country’s land area of 30 million hectares.
By 1980, only about 7.5 million hectares of forest were left. At the end of 1990, only 6.64 million remained. Most of those considered “old growth forest” were confined to steep and very steep areas and were not often accessible.
In 1995, the country barely had 5.6 million hectares (less than 19% of the land area) of forest cover. “For at least 20 years now, we have this forest crisis which has been getting worse every year,” Dr. J.A.V. Revilla, then a visiting professor at the Forestry Development Center of the University of the Philippines at Los Baños (UPLB), told a conference organized by the National Academy of Science and Technology.
“At the rate we are re-establishing forest cover during the last 20 years, it would take us 250 years to reforest (the country),” Dr. Revilla deplored. “That is assuming that forest cover loss stops immediately and that we finally become effective in our reforestation efforts.”
More often than not, illegal loggers in cohorts with politicians were blamed for the rapid disappearance of the country’s forest cover.
In 2002, a report which appeared in The Manila Times said that 354,00 board feet of giant trees – many already sawn to sizes – were discovered in Don Salvador Benedicto, a mountain town in northern Negros.
“Government officials, environmentalists and the public were reportedly shocked by the magnitude of forest destruction in the town, part of the 35,000-hectare wide Northern Negros Forest Reserve,” the news report said.
Loggers are not the sole culprit. Even farmers themselves are partly to be blamed. In a news report published by the Manila Bulletin, this information was taken: “Vast tracts of forest lands which were once lush now stand barren, unproductive due to widespread and continuous practice of kaingin (slash-and-burn farming). As a result, severe denudation and soil erosion have made it almost impossible for these lands to recover, if at all.”
Other causes of deforestation include mining, overgrazing and road construction.
Is there a way the country can reverse this tide? “The generic response to forest degradation is to plant tree, but we don’t know what this accomplishes or does not,” Walpole wrote. “We have lost most of our forests of old growth over the past 50 years and, along with them, many of the ecological services they provide.”
In 2005, the FAO regional office came up with a book entitled, In Search of Excellence: Exemplary Forest Management in Asia and the Pacific. It shattered the myth that there is no positive forestry being practiced in the region.
The book featured three success stories from the Philippines. One of them is the forestry program is the Kalahan Forest Reserve (KFR) which is located between Sante Fe, Nueva Vizcaya and San Nicolas, Pangasinan.
“Why should I be ashamed of the forest when it our home and it sustain us?” said a native Ikalahan (“kalahan” literally means “forest” while the prefix “I” means “from” or “living in”).
The KFR is a compelling example of an indigenous ethnic group using forestry practices to help maintain cultural identity. It has emerged as “a model for community-based forest management, and for reducing threats to ancestral lands.”
In fact, the Ikalahans have gone far beyond that in developing a holistic system on forest management. The system incorporates crucial aspects of Ikalahan culture, coupled with entrepreneurship and forward-looking leadership focused on maintaining a viable ethnic culture in the modern world.
Another success story came from Kalibo in Aklan. “Forest from the mud” was the title of the case of Buswang Mangrove Plantations. In the past, the area was nothing more than a bare mudflat that left the nearby town exposed to flooding caused by high tides and typhoons. Something must be done so a group called Kalibo Save the Mangroves Association (KASAMA) was born and together they effectively planted and maintained a mangrove forest.
A key challenge for the group in the beginning was to protect the area, and later the forest from encroachers, including attempts by powerful individuals to appropriate part of the area for their own use.
KASAMA and the Department of Environment and Natural Resources eventually signed a Community-Based Forest Management Agreement that awarded secure rights over the mangrove forests and enabled the group to establish a successful ecotourism venture, capitalizing on its forest asset.
Lastly, there’s the muyong as practiced by the Ifugao people. In landscapes, otherwise characterized by deforested hillsides, the time-tested muyong are patches of forest adjacent to Ifugao settlements, which help protect against runoff and erosion, and ensure a steady supply of water to nearby rice paddies even in times of drought.
Muyong are cultivated to provide building materials, wood for carving traditional handicrafts, and other non-timber forest products that have been a part of the Ifugao cultural system dating back many hundreds of years.
Philippines should not look for reforestation models from other countries. It has already such practices and all it has to do is apply them in areas where can be managed sustainably.
