“A person without children would face a hopeless future; a country without trees is almost as helpless.” – Theodore Roosevelt, American president
“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 chain sawing.”
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 national scientist Dr. Dioscoro L. Umali. “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. They 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.”
“Most of the country’s once rich forests are gone,” says the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) study entitled, “Sustainable Forest Management.”
“We have lost most of our forest of old over the past 50 years and, along with them, many of the ecological services they provide,” deplores Peter Walpole, executive director of the Environmental Science for Social Change (ESSC).
In the 1920s, forest still covered 18 million hectares of 60% of the country’s total land area of 30 million hectares. It went down to 50% (15 million hectares) in the 1950s. In 1963, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization published data that placed forest cover of the country at 40% (12 million hectares).
By 1970s, the forest cover shrunk to 34% (10.2 million hectares). From 1977 to 1980, deforestation reached an all-time high – over 300,000 hectares a year, according to a booklet published by ESSC.
In 1987, the Swedish Space Corporation put forest cover in the country at 23% (6.9 million hectares). “At the end of the 1980s, out of the 34 major islands that had been very densely forested at the beginning of the century, 24 islands had now less than 10% forest cover,” the ESSC publication said.
In the 1990s, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources reported that the country had only 800,000 hectares (2.7%) primary forest cover. Residual forest was placed at 4.7 million hectares.
“Where have all our forests gone?” asked Roy C. Alimoane, the director of the Davao-based Mindanao Baptist Rural Life Center (MBRLC). “Why are we losing our trees at a very fast rate?”
The ever-growing population can be partly blamed. “The most likely causes were the increase in population — up from about 500,000 in 152 to around seven million in 1900,” the ESSC publication surmised. Today, the Philippines is home to more than 100 million Filipinos.
“This was accompanied by the spread of commercial crops (abaca, tobacco and sugarcane) and by growth of pasture lands for cattle raising as the Philippines became part of the world economy,” the publication continued.
But logging – both legal and illegal – is seen as the primary culprit. “An important source of deforestation has been the dramatic expansion of destructive logging,” wrote Robert Repetto in “The Forest for the Trees? Government Policies and the Misuse of Forest Resources.”
The logging boomed in the late 1960s. “Logging concession areas increased from 4.5 million hectares to 11.6 million hectares, covering more than one-third of the entire country,” the ESSC publication reported. “Timber companies owned by the traditional elite, the Philippine military, and politicians cornered the logging contracts.”
According to Repetto, annual outputs averaging 10 million cubic meters were maintained until 1974, “when depletion, world recession, and competition from other log-exporting countries forced a reduction.”
Declines continued over the next decade, and by 1984 the harvest had returned to the pre-boo level of 3.8 million cubic meters.
“Logging is more than an ecological problem,” the book, “Saving the Earth,” published by the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, surmised. “It is a social, political and economic dilemma as well. At the root of the malaise are stupendous profits and the ease with which they can be raked in.”
Upland migration and agricultural expansion had also contributed to the fast disappearance of the country’s forest cover. “Some 80,000 to 120,000 families cleared an estimated 2.3 million hectares of forest land,” Repetto wrote. “The spread of shifting cultivation largely reflects population growth and the economy’s failure to provide employment alternatives for the country’s rural poor.”
The ESSC believes that had all these factors been carried out in a manner that contributed to the overall development of the country, “the majority of the people could have been benefited.”
However, historical land classification indicates that only very few people — less than 500 individuals or corporations — had held access rights to most of the country’s forest resources. “This figure highlights the injustice,” the ESSC publication points out.
The ESSC thinks the responsibility for the present sad state of the Philippine forest rests with past administrations. “There has been a near total failure on the part of the government to recognize the sociocultural and ecological values of the forests,” it says, adding that they failed “to recognize any value except short-term economic gain.”
The ESSC also fears that this “short-term economic gain” thinking may also be “repeated in the drive to adopt mining as the answer to our economic development.” In the Philippines, mining operations are oftentimes located in ancestral land, forest land, and even prime agricultural land.
But the destruction caused by deforestation are already written on the wall. “Deforestation has left upper watersheds unprotected, destabilizing river flows, with significant effects on fish population and agriculture,” Repetto wrote. “The implications for hydroelectric projects and irrigation facilities have already become apparent in Luzon, where anticipated lifetimes of important reservoirs have been cut in half by sedimentation.”
In The World for World is Forest, Ursula K. Le Guin wrote: “A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it.” Forest is home to some of the most ecologically-fragile flora and fauna.
“More than 400 plant and animal species in the Philippines are currently threatened with extinction, including the Philippine eagle and the tamaraw,” the Washington D.C.-based Population Reference Bureau reported.
The Philippine Eagle Foundation said that a pair of Philippine eagle needs at least 7,000 to 13,000 hectares of forest as nesting territory. “The Philippine eagle has become a critically endangered species because the loss of the forest had made it lose its natural habitat,” explained Dennis Salvador, PEF’s executive director.
According to Dr. Lasco, deforestation is one of the leading causes of greenhouse gas emissions. “Ten billion to 12 billion tons of carbon dioxide are released per year due to deforestation, that is loss of forest, as well as through agriculture, such as livestock, soil and nutrient management,” he pointed out. (To be continued)
