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Sunday, November 14, 2004
Mercado: Stumbling into national hara-kiri
By Juan L. Mercado
Is a nut loose in our national psyche, flogging us nearer to the brink of national suicide?
That question stems from what Environment Secretary Michael Defensor told a Subic meeting of local executives: Only 30 percent of reforestation projects succeeded. “People hardly recognize the economic benefits from protecting the environment. Most sabotaged the program.”
The candor rings true. The United Nations, in fact, gave the same stark assessment in September 2003 – two months before flash floods swept hundreds to death in denuded Southern Leyte. (Who recalls Ormoc’s 8,000 fatalities?)
“Most of the country’s once rich forests are gone,” says the Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) study, “Sustainable Forest Management.” “Forest recovery, through natural and artificial means, never coped with the destruction rate.”
In 1575, forests blanketed 92 percent of the country. When the Leyte tragedy struck, timber cover was 18 percent. Centuries of plunder crafted anguished proverbs. “Do not cut the trees to get the fruit,” Ilocanos and Tausugs say. “A sturdy tree resists the winds,” Boholanos note.
Rehabilitation programs, however, faltered. Here are excerpts from FAO and Asian Development Bank studies:
Plantations: “Many are `paper plantations’… (Most) have died from a combination of drought, sabotage, pest attacks, fire or some other form of neglect.”
Watersheds: Most “are invariably degraded characterized by soil erosion, erratic stream flow, declining groundwater tables.”
Mangroves: Out of 500,000 hectares in 1900, only 109,000 hectares remain.”
A prima donna among world timber exporters in 1970, the Philippines today is a wood-pauper. It buys from countries that reforested: New Zealand, Malaysia and Australia.
It’s also a mismanagement “case study.” “The experience of the Philippines provides a poignant lesson for (still-forest rich countries) like Cambodia, Laos, Myannmar, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands,” UN’s “Asia-Pacific Forestry Towards 2010” points out.
In the 1960s, we exported 10 million cubic meters yearly. By 1980, accessible timber stands had been chain-sawed. Exports dwindled to less than a tenth of boom-time levels.
Timber barons stashed money abroad, bought flashy cars and mansions, etc. Were they forerunners of today’s OFWs relatives? Few save or invest from remittances, an ADB study shows. Instead, they splurge on “consumables”: cell phones, clothes.
Local governments act likewise. Few LGUs invest Internal Revenue Allotments (IRA) in productivity, the Commission on Audit found. Much of IRAs is dissipated for “personal services”: P513 million in Pangasinan to P423 million by Negros Occidental.
Doles bloat “maintenance and operating expenses”: Cebu province at P690 million to Iloilo’s P431 million.
Failure to invest left the country without wood, factories or technicians. Instead, we were saddled “with a legacy of problems and no means of raising revenues to alleviate them,” FAO notes.
Thus, the Philippines is sidelined as North American and Asia-Pacific demand for wood-based panels, paper and paperboard explode.
Massive poverty exacerbates pressure on remaining forests. But economic benefits from forests are still creamed by the elites. Unless, policies give people a share in benefits, the poor will not conserve. Why should they? They have no stake in a system that merely redistributes penury.
“Do not expect me to have any vested interest in the peace and security of a world that keeps me and my children hungry,” Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda once said. “That peace is an imposition.”
Natural resource systems, from seas to fauna, underpin human life and communities. A country that savages them commits hara-kiri.
“For your children, the rich texture of Philippine mahogany will be, at best, a quaint story,” the late National Scientist Dioscoro Umali told a UP graduating class. “And the victims are our grandchildren: bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh.”
A Greater Negros and Panay Faunal Region survey gives a glimpse what this savant meant. Most schoolchildren had no idea of rain forests. When asked to draw, they depicted neat rows of plantation trees.
“Few of today’s youngsters ever saw Philippine mahogany (vitex parviflora), a forester explains. “Baby-boomers think molave is a street sign.”
What happens if leaders’ mindsets are similarity lobotomized? Policy is torn by widely different accounts, “Foreign Affairs” Steven Anderson warns. One would tally ecological costs and the other considers only pesos and centavos.
Cebu’s mint-new governor Gwendolyn Garcia exemplifies this dilemma.
“We have a budget surplus and no debts,” she proudly said. But Cebu also has staggering ecological deficits: from zero forest cover to 70 percent soil erosion. She showed no awareness of the gap.
“There is a new and dangerous dimension to hunger,” Magsaysay awardee and Princess Sirindhorn has written. “The very systems that enable us to feed world are under threat.” Destroying those systems is hara-kiri.
(juan_mercado@pacific.net.ph)
(November 14, 2004 issue)
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