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Sunday, January 08, 2006
Dacawi: Genuine forest and resource management
By Ramon Dacawi
AS SLOW as a pine tree grows, it took too long for the government to mature enough to admit the effectiveness of tribal forest management practiced for centuries up here in the Cordillera. Still, it took somebody as young and daring as environment and natural resources Secretary Mike Defensor to discern that indigenous culture-based forestry, not government policies, preserved this mountain range as the vital watershed cradle of Northern Luzon.
Defensor last Monday readily signed a pact with leaders of Mt. Province for the recognition of the time-honored indigenous forestry systems of the Igorots over the pine stands that are unique to this region. Also bound by the documents were National Commission on Indigenous Peoples Chairperson Jannette Serrano, Gov. Maximo Dalog and Leon Langtiwan of the province's IPs consultative body.
They signed the document in Sagada, that culture-bound and scenic town also known for its man-made pine forest traditionally owned by the families, clans and communities who planted and cared for them. The pact will serve as the model for similar arrangements also covering the pine forests of the other Cordillera provinces. These will be in accord with their own traditional practices, be it the "muyong" or "pinugo" of Ifugao, the "imong" of Kalinga, the "kijuwan" of Benguet, the "lapat" of Abra and Apayao or the "batangan/saguday/pinucho" and "tayan/taban" of Mt. Province.
Previous calls for recognition of indigenous knowledge and resource ownership were voices lost in the wilderness. Over the years, state policies and laws framed in Manila were culturally insensitive and often clashed with long-existing tribal laws on ownership, management and access to our forest resources up here. Long before the Regalian Doctrine was imposed, villagers had been maintaining their forests quite effectively without government intervention and disruption.
In recent years, forestry technocrats in the big city started looking for smarter ways of saving what remains of this country's forests. They came up with borrowed ideas like "community-based forestry management" and, more recently, the controversial "usufruct" plantation scheme. They glossed over the fact that the genuine, time-tested models of CBFM have been up here long before they were born. They could have built on these existing models.
Instead, they hatched the unlamented and aborted "usufruct" scheme that allowed government workers, especially in the DENR, immediate tenurial rights over idle spaces simply because they had just planted seedlings.
We have had discussions with then Negros Occidental governor Rafael Coscolluella and other members of the Philippine Watershed Management Coalition on the wisdom of encouraging people to plant seedlings under the "usufruct' 'scheme. The catch was that participants were supposed to receive immediate tenurial rights over idle spaces simply because they had just planted. The irony was that some of these seedling plantations were beside those of long-time hill dwellers whose own rights over lands they have occupied for a lifetime have yet to be recognized.
Up here, the irony was, and is, obviously more encompassing. While state laws restricted tribal access to forest resources that villagers need to build or repair their houses, logging permits were issued to firms from the outside to prop up the mining industry. Rivers and tribal lands were dammed to generate electric power needed to spur national development.
The region has been practically mined out and two of the dams up here are now on their death throes. The national government has yet to remit Benguet province's share from gold mine taxes amounting to millions of pesos. Several villages within the resource base have yet to have electricity. It was a bizarre version of the build-operate-transfer scheme: they built and operated the mines and dams and transferred the gold, electric power, together with the taxes, to Makati and Metro-Manila.
A current, particular case in point is that fund being generated from the operation of dams like the 345-megawatt San Roque in San Nicolas and San Manuel in Pangasinan. For every kilowatt-hour produced and sold, a centavo is set aside to go to the development of the "host community". Curiously, the Department of Energy, which handles the fund that runs to millions of pesos a year, defined a "host LGU" to be where the- dam facility was built.
Unless the infrastructure-based definition shifts to glaringly more just river basin concept, Benguet and parts of Baguio where the water that runs the turbines of San Roque comes from will never get a share from the fund. The fund is to be used for development projects, lowering the cost of electricity and for protection of the watersheds (which are obviously up here).
My relatives in Hungduan, Ifugao, whose "pinugo" forest management ensures regular flow of water to the Magat Dam downstream, have a funny solution to the inequity. They are contemplating on diverting the flow of their river away from the Magat River. They may well succeed with the same technology their ancestors used in carving those rice terraces out whole mountainsides centuries ago.
I've diverted the flow of this sad refrain of an old lament. There you go again, playing that old record nobody listens to anymore, my mind tells me. Forget the water under the bridge, go back on track and to the future.
The signing of the Sagada, witnessed by no less than Presidential Assistant Thomas Killip, mayors and tribal leaders and elders, may prove to be a historical act. It's the result of Defensor's unusual power to listen to indigenous wisdom and to act according to the dictates of reason. Members of his think-tank - regional executive director Samuel Peñafiel of the DENR, regional technical director Augusto Lagon, provincial environment officers Manny Pogeyed and Peter Osbucan, foresters Moises Bai and Rex Sapla and their staff - sacrificed their holidays to help him flesh out the document.
(January 8, 2006 issue)
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