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Wednesday, December 08, 2004
Osmeña: Deforestation: Short-term gain
By Antonio V. Osmeña
Estatements
DEATH AND DESTRUCTION. It is not a joke to witness people dying after mudflow and landslides due to deforestation from illegal logging.
Many of the direct causes of increased tropical deforestation spring from bad governance. People are allowed to partially or completely clear our forests for growing crops, grazing livestock, gathering firewood, mining and commercial logging.
The indirect causes of deforestation are poverty, land ownership patterns that favor a few wealthy landowners, unemployment, rapid population growth and the failure of government to regulate local and national timber companies.
The export of lumber cut from tropical forests and beef from cattle grazing on forests converted to pasture can, in the short term, provide our country with valuable foreign capital.
Without appropriate reforestation and conservation programs, however, the long-term result is forest eradication, with a potentially renewable resource converted into a nonrenewable resource. Worse, it has caused flooding and death to thousands of people.
When tropical forests are cleared for timber, agriculture or grazing, they are more difficult to reestablish than temperate forests.
Irreversible destruction of these forests is also encouraged because government has failed to supervise the requirement for timber companies to replace cleared areas. In a clear-cutting operation, any person or company should be required to pay a royalty or fee for each area cleared so that the government can replace denuded areas.
Timber companies that cut roads into virgin forests are usually followed by poor people looking for land on which to grow subsistence crops. With or without government support, landless farmers cut, burn and clear a section of the forest, and plant crops for years until the soil is exhausted.
To illustrate, Cebu presents an unlikely environment for extensive human settlement. The long narrow island possesses a rugged interior with very few lowland plains, even along its coast. A porous limestone base and limited rainfall have made Cebu unusually dry for a tropical setting.
On only a few coastal lowland areas have Cebuanos been able to produce wet rice; their stable food has always been a dry crop. Deforestation and subsequent erosion over the centuries have left much of the island unsuitable for agriculture.
The difficulty of obtaining food in Cebu in the mid-16th Century was one of the main reasons the Spanish conqueror Legaspi abandoned the island in search of a more hospitable agricultural environment elsewhere in the archipelago.
To reduce the destruction of the tropical forests in the other islands of the Philippines, ecologists and foresters have suggested that the government secure commitments to plant many more trees, requiring timber companies and consumers to bear a greater share of the costs of reforestation.
Areas in which soil under tropical forests are best suited for various purposes should be identified.
These areas should then be zoned for their best use. Agro-forestry techniques should then be used, simultaneously planting fast-growing tree crops and food crops on newly cleared forest land, so when the soil is exhausted for growing crops, the new trees are well on the way to restoring the forests.
Finally, there should be a great increase in the funding for research on tropical soils and development of agriculture, grazing and silviculture practices more suitable to these areas.
(December 8, 2004 issue)
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