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Sunday, September 18, 2005
Mercado: Case studies to weep over
By Juan L. Mercado
Have we become adept, as a nation, at churning out case studies on how to fail? Look at key sectors of our economy, like forests and water, then decide.
“The Philippine experience, as a major supplier of hardwood logs, provides a poignant lesson for today’s (still-forest rich) countries,” says the Food and Agriculture Organization.
In 1575, over 92 per cent of the country was forested. “In it’s virgin state, Philippine forests were among the most commercially-viable in the world,” notes FAO’s study: Asia-Pacific Forestry Towards 2010.
“The Philippines was the first Asia-Pacific country, in the post World War II era, to extensively liquidate it’s forest wealth,” this UN case study adds.
In the 60s and 70s, we strutted as a world timber exporter. Yearly, freighters hauled out 10 million cubic meters of wood for markets abroad. But the industry’s leaders acted as if they had no grandchildren.
“Thus, the 1960’s `Timber Prima Donna’ became the `Wood Pauper’ of today,” Inquirer pointed out. “The timber mafia spent for flashy cars, mansions, jewelry - even costly runs for Congress to protect shrinking forest concessions.”
Little of harvested forest wealth was invested in down-stream processing industries, FAO says. “Nor was attention paid to sustainable management.”
By the 1980s, this once-lavish resource petered out. Today, we shop for timber abroad. “Net imports cost the country 10 times the value of its forestry exports.”
Countries like Cambodia or Papua New Guinea still have extensive forests. Japan conserves its timber stands. It buys abroad, from the Philippines in the past, now from countries that reforested, like New Zealand.
Self-imposed timber-penury is seen in wood shortages, lack of factories and trained technicians. These shut the country out from 21st century money spinners: round and sawn wood, paper, plywood and other panels, etc. Demand for these products, specially in North America, has exploded.
A shoddy case study on water emerges in Cebu City.
There, Mayor Tomas Osmeña’s “Crown Jewel” is a sprawling 295-hectare South Reclamation Project, scraped from the sea with a bloated P6.3 billion loan. It is crisscrossed by access roads, power lines and canals, flanked by a six-lane, 12-kilometer national highway—and short of water.
“Whiskey’s for drinkin’,” Mark Twain once wrote “But water is for fightin’ over.” And SRP biggest brawls are not over conflicting land titles by Talisay City. They’ll be over water. How did this come about?
The metropolis itself already siphons 300,000 cubic meters daily from its limited aquifers, twice the amount they can recharge. Asian Development Bank notes Metro Cebu Water District serves only more than half of households. Salt contamination of limited aquifers has seeped almost to the city’s foothills, the prestigious Water Resources Center reveals.
But Osmeña never crafted a city master plan. His administration has “policy black holes” in water, land use, foreign loans, housing, youth, peri-urban areas and other critical areas, Cebu Daily News editorially noted.
Sole-decision making exacerbates this flaw. Osmeña clamped, for example, a decade long blackout on SRP yen loans - now chewing a quarter of City Hall’s budgets in interest payments alone. SRP construction ignored essentials like water. “He has all the virtues we dislike and none of the vices we admire,” the paper said.
If taps are dry, no investor in his right mind will locate, says Cebu Investments Promotion Center’s Joel Mari Yu. Scrubbing sea water of salt is an alternative for SRP. But it’s costly..
Desalting water costs 10 times more than piping water from conventional sources, Worldwatch Institute estimates. Yet, Osmeña assailed as “too costly” a carefully drawn up Ayala offer to pipe water in from Carmen town, 40 kilometers away.
But he kept mum on costs of desalinating seawater for SRP. An April 2005 FAO consultation on water desalination in Rome said it’d cost between US$1.00 and US$1.50 per cubic meter. What is sauce for the goose is not necessarily sauce for the gander?
Osmeña is boxed into desalination by his earlier decisions. He sneaked to Singapore which launched a US$119 million desalination plant. It will meet at least 10 per cent of the city-state’s water needs, and reduce dependence on Johore reservoirs in next door Malaysia.
Singapore’s water agreements with Malaysia expire by 2061. But even this early, Singapore - unlike laid-back us - is moving to ensure self-sufficiency by augmenting supply and conserving.
Singapore started recycling and purifying sewage water in 2003. Half the island is already used for rainwater collection. It aims to make that 90 per cent. (Cebu City Council hasn’t even discussed a draft ordinance on rain catchments.).
“Water is for us not an inexhaustible gift of nature, the Singapore Prime Minister said. “We must husband it - a reference to 1963/64 rationing from drought.
Singapore is, in fact, a case study on how to succeed.
“Desalination is energy-intensive,” Sun.Star noted in February 2002. It burns oil. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iran swap oil for water. They can afford to. Cebu cannot. Modern technology has brought costs down. But oil at US$70 a barrel wiped that advantage out.
“No city relishes being straight-jacketed into high-cost energy-intensive water systems,” is the point in this shoddy case study. “And that’s where Cebu is headed for.”
(September 18, 2005 issue)
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