Text and Photos by Henrylito D. Tacio
“To be poor and be without trees is to be the most starved human being in the world. To be poor and have trees is to be completely rich in ways that money can never buy.” — Clarissa Pinkola Estés, author of The Faithful Gardener: A Wise Tale About That Which Can Never Die
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If the Philippines will not do something now, it will be the first country in Asia to completely lose its forest cover soon. Cebu is a case in point: It has a “zero-forest cover,” environment officials have said.
“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,” says Peter Walpole, executive director of the Environmental Science for Social Change (ESSC).
In the 1920s, forest still covered 18 million hectares of 60 percent of the country’s total land area of 30 million hectares. It went down to 50 percent (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 percent (12 million hectares).
By 1970s, the forest cover shrunk to 34 percent (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 percent (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 percent 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 percent) 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.
Upland migration and agricultural expansion have also contributed to the past 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.
Water, one of man’s basic needs, is expected to diminish as trees disappear. A certain Diosmedes Demit, a farmer from Bukidnon, told a reporter on why he was joining the ‘Fast for the Forests’: “If the forest perishes, so will the life of people. The trees are our source of life. Without trees, there will be no water. If there is no water, there will be no life.”
The environment department said that the current administration of Benigno Aquino III is trying to help protect the country’s remaining forest cover by launching the National Greening Program (NGP). It seeks to cover 1.5 million hectares with 1.5 billion trees for six years from 2011 to 2016. “That is 86 percent more than the reforestation efforts of the country in the past 25 years!” exclaimed DENR Secretary Ramon J.P. Paje.
“Maybe there is an increase in the number of trees, but it is not the forest we idealize, romanticize, log or even live in,” Walpole said. “The generic response to forest degradation is to plant trees, but we don’t know what this accomplishes or does not.”
So, where have all our forests gone? “A person without children would face a hopeless future; a country without trees is almost as helpless,” American President Theodore Roosevelt reminded.
