WHEN flash floods hit Tugbok the other day, the usual environment faultfinders quickly blamed it to their current favorite whipping boy - Hedcor. It could not have been so because the Hedcor's dam is only 2.5 meters high and whenever water rises beyond that it just flows out towards Talomo river. It turned out that the culprit is in fact a dike alongside Shanghai creek, which gave way because of an unusual heavy rain in upper Guianga. Barangay officials later confirmed this to be the cause of the disastrous floods, which inundated crops and properties in Tugbok.

The blame game along with the scare ruse is often employed by non-government organizations to obtain what they hanker for. They ride on popular issues and sometimes take advantage of gullible groups and even corporate establishments to advance their own fund-raising agenda. The publicity they get are neatly collected and cataloged and then sent to donor foundations that are mostly based in Europe, Canada, US, and Australia. This panhandling enterprise should not be worrisome except that they damage reputations, image and even the businesses of those they point their fingers on.

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While they are quick to find fault and are quite savvy in fund-raising rarely can you find people behind these inter-locking foundations actually involved in the cause they purportedly support. Their garrulity is not translated into action. Take the case of flash floods, which has its root cause on the unmitigated cutting of trees in the slopes of Mt. Apo which is a national park. So much had been said about this, but who among the noisy fund seekers are really sparing money to replant denuded forest and conserve the remaining forest cover in the area? The only group I know which have quietly went into replanting denuded areas is the one of Pastor Apollo C. Quiboloy. Unfortunately, some stupid characters who thought the pastor was land-grabbing, went on a frenzy of cutting down hundreds of fully grown pine trees. There are also well-meaning individuals, organizations, like the Rotary, and corporations, like AMS Group, which helped the Davao City Water District in reforestation activities. I wonder however if DCWD itself used its resources for this task.

Floods and depletion of water resource can be mitigated by restoring forest cover in areas that had been denuded by illegal loggers and kaingeneros (slash and burn farmers) in the Mt. Apo reservation. It needs action, not verbal calisthenics. They want to tap Tamogan river for alternate water source and electricity? DCWD and Hedcor cannot fool the people that one of them is better than the other. Instead of quarreling and engaging in tomfoolery with the aid of environmental foundation activists they better sit down together and map out how they can jointly develop this rich resource and protect, conserve and reforest the vast expanse of balding reservation area of Mt. Apo. And then hopefully, flash floods like what happened in Tugbok will be a thing of the past.