MANILA, Philippines - Once a lavish exporter of logs. Now a heavy importer of this wood product.
Also, a big chunk of the country’s lumber and other forest products, on top of the imported logs, is now sourced from Asian and Pacific countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, China, Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea) and as far as Canada in North America, Brazil in South America, South Africa, and Germany in Europe.
This is how pathetic the Philippines has become.
Centuries back, when billions of trees lushly mantled the country’s mountains, who would think that Filipinos would one day become log importers?
That fateful day came in the 1980s.
During the 1989-2003 period, the Philippines imported 7.7 million cubic meters of logs valued at $925.6 million (about P508 billion at the then peso-dollar exchange rate), National Statistics Office (NSO) records showed.
The country began heavily importing logs in 1989, buying 397,926 cu m valued then at $29.82 milllion.
Log importation peaked in 1996 when 877,585 cu m woth $127.4 million were shipped in. It decreased to 768,474 cu m in 1997 and down to 584,759 cu m in 2000.
It slid further to 164,960 cu m in 2005 and to 77,557 cu m in 2008, statistics obtained by The STAR from the Philippine Council for Agriculture, Forestry and Natural Resources Research and Development PCARRD) indicated.
NSO records also showed that the country imported 4.26 million cu m of lumber valued at $1.03 billion during the 1993-2003 period.
Lumber importation peaked in 1996 when the Philippines sourced from other countries 567,426 cu m valued at $162 million. It went down and up and down in the succeeding years, settling at 164,595 cu m in 2005.
Today, a former Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) undersecretary reported recently, the country needs about 2.5 million cu m of wood, most of it imported, to feed its wood-based industry that sells in the international markets.
The 20th century Filipino, records now attest, has been the most wanton and destructive exploiter of the country’s natural resources.
Consider the following mind-boggling data gathered from various sources, among them the DENR-Forest Management Bureau (FMB) and United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (UN-FAO):
• At the height of the logging industry in the 1960s and 1970s, a high 300,000 hectares of forests were cleared yearly. This is one-thirtieth of the country’s total land area of 30 million ha.
• During 1990-2000, deforestation was still high at 260,000 ha/yr. The deforestation rate decreased to 157,000 ha/yr during the 2000-2005 period.
The question new is: Will the 21st century Filipino (particularly the greedy and rapacious legal and illegal loggers and survivalist mountain dwellers) be left unbridled to wipe out what is left of the country’s forest resources?
With the unabated degradation of the environment set against the grim backdrop of a burgeoning population (fast racing to the 100 million mark), one wonders how well the Philippines will fare in its “race against time”.
Over the past two decades, catastrophes triggered by natural phenomena, notably typhoons and floods, swept communities in various parts of the country.
A glaring example was the deluge that sent thousands of residents of Ormoc City (Southern Leyte) to their watery graves in 1991.
In succeeding years, nature again angrily fought back with vengeance.
Mudslides buried villages in Guinsaugon (also in Southern Leyte) and Albay. Floods and landslides also subsequently swept Eastern Samar, resulting in the death of many old and young people alike.
Even legendary Mt. Makiling in Laguna was not spared. When typhoon “Milenyo” unleashed its fury on the mountain in 2006, 15 residents of Barangay Bagong Silang in the heart of the storied mountain perished in a landslide of boulders, uprooted trees and mud triggered by floodwaters cascading from the mountain.
Moreover, who can forget the deaths and properly destruction wrought by typhoons Ondoy, Pepeng, Frank, Basyang, and other deadly howlers that battered the country in recent years.
The grim projection is out: At the rate the Philippines is ravaging its natural resources, it world be the first Southeast Asian country to lose its forests within the first half of the present century.
Centuries back, the country’s primeval forests were a paradise to behold.
During the last quarter of the 16th century, at the early period of the Spanish colonization of the country, forests covered about 27 million hectares (more than 90 percent) of the total land area of 30 million ha.
The mountain ecosystem then natured about 3,500 species of indigenous trees, 8,120 species of flowering plants, 950 species and subspecies of birds, 240 to 260 species and subspecies of reptiles, and 640 species of mosses.
Many years back, too, about 3,800 species of plants endemic to the Philippine archipelago and not found anywhere in the world had been recorded.
By 1920 when there were only a little more than 12 million Filipinos, there were still about 18 million ha. of natural forests. This shrank to 17 million ha. in the mid-1930s, when the population was about 15 million.
By the 1990s, when there were already more than 70 million Filipinos, only 5.4 million ha. of forests were left, much of which were nonproductive and less than a million hectares of virgin forests.
In 2005, with the country’s burgeoning population having reached 86 million, only 16 provinces – 14 in Luzon and one each in the Visayas and Mindanao – had forests cover of only more than 50 percent, based on Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) figures.
That was five years ago and, for sure, a big chunk of those forests has also been scraped.
With the sordid state of the country’s mountain ecosystem, the coming generations of Filipinos can only read in books and historical accounts the paradise that once was Philippine forests.
Many of the country’s prized floral (plant) and faunal (animal) species have vanished or are headed for extinction because of the unabated destruction of mountains attributed to logging, swidden or kaingin (slash-and-burn) farming, forest fires, posts and diseases, and irresponsible mining operations.
Yet the worst has yet to come.
What are left of the country’s remaining forest do not stand a chance against the millions of Filipinos now occupying the uplands in view of the lack of life-sustaining opportunities in the lowlands.
No less than the DENR had reported that as of 1999, there were already 18.3 million people, mostly among the country’s “poorest of the poor”, in the uplands.
It has further been projected that the number of forest dwellers will soar to 37 million by 2015, which is only less than half a decade away.
If these trends continue, warned environment expert Dr. Ma. Concepcion Cruz years back, two major adverse consequences would occur.
One, to meet the food needs of people living in mountains, more forestlands will be cleared for agriculture.
Two, as upland agriculture intensifies, soil erosion, flooding, siltation and sedimentation will take place, affecting the lowlands. Upland migrants, possessing little cultural adaptation to mountain environments, will reduce the forests into degraded croplands, as vast tracts of mountain areashave already been converted into veritable dustbowls.
Over the decades, as again today, the issue of “total log ban” cropped up whenever natural calamities bludgeoned the Philippines.
But a fact remain: Who will implement the total log ban?
The perturbing thing is that both pro and con are correct. What will the “Solomonic” solution then be?
This writer still remembers well the results of studies done by the University of the Philippines Los Baños (UPLB) on the suspension or cancellation of licenses of some timber logging concessions found violating forestry laws.
After the concessions had left, hordes of upland dwellers descended upon the logging sites and, mostly applying the “carabao logging” practice, wiped out what was left from the logging operations.
We recall, too, the candid admission of a former DENR official in a public forum that because of the miserable lives of the upland settlers, the government could not muster the necessary “political will” to implement forestry laws.
In recapitulation, a forest scientists and professor once reworded a song titled “Where have all the flowers gone.”
Here’s Dr. Edwino Fernando’s version: “Where have all the trees gone?/ Men have cut them every one/When will they ever learn?/ When will they ever learn?”
When will Filipinos ever learn from the death-dealing catastrophics that now happen with regularity during typhoon and rainy seasons owing to the destruction of the country’s forest resources?
Perhaps, when the last tree in the mountain has been felled.
Source: http://www.philstar.com/ArticlePrinterFriendly.aspx?articleId=662074&publicationSubCategoryId=66
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