Category: environment

environment 6: beyond transparency

BEYOND TRANSPARENCY

Junie Kalaw

The launching of the Coalition for Transparency in Government provided President Corazon Aquino an opportunity to focus on a quality of governance whose absence from the national scene has been a major impediment to honest political and social reform. It was acknowledged that the lack of transparency has served to encourage and hide corruption and protect the vested interests of politicians and their business partners. It was also accepted that its presence should be an important mechanism for the participation of people in development. But what is not often pointed out is that transparency has an active dimension: it involves publicly disclosing and revealing what is in mere storage. Deliberate secrecy in government transactions is a crime against transparency.

It has been argued that the transparency of government was proven by the explosive headlines merited by such anomalies as the congressional fondness for overpriced coconut juice, sleek uzis, and smuggled cars. There is a sense, however, in which these thunderous dramas actually obscured the larger issue of the continuing legitimized plunder of our natural resources by a privileged few through multinational land tenure, forest logging concessions, and foreign mining and fishing operations. Real transparency has to begin with a disclosure of the involvement of public officials in the primary exploitation of natural resources, and this obviously is a responsibility of the state, which controls all access.

Within the context of development (the professed objective of all governments), the most relevant, and at the same time simplest, question to ask is: who will benefit from it? Land reform for whom? Selective logging for whom? In short, development for whom? In the interests of transparency, it must also be asked who should plan for development. And since the great majority of Filipinos today live below the poverty line, the issue is not just economic in nature but concerns the structural stability of Philippine society.

Upon examination of the mechanisms government has made available to the people to enable them to participate creatively in the democratic planning process, it seems that government did not sufficiently understand that it could actually be adding to the general muddiness. Public hearings, for example, were attended mostly by politicians and businessmen with personal vested interests. The Senate hearings on the log ban bill were attended mostly by loggers and government bureaucrats. There was no representation from the ethnic groups, upland dwellers, small fishermen, and farmers who are most affected by the continuing denudation of forests. The consultative conferences government held with academics included non-government organizations (NGOs). But these consultations were really just venues for the legitimization of the sponsor’s position with no provisions for feedback from divergent positions, let alone their resolution.

The Aquino government did not disdain to use the tripartite councils initiated during the dictatorship. But while these councils may have had the potential to be effective mechanisms for people’s participation, they suffered the tyranny of withheld information. To be truly effective, these councils need to share equally with private and non-government organizations all information about project assumptions and analyses.

The situation was compounded by the constraints imposed by the matter of foreign debt. In view of the profound effects of foreign debt transactions on the quality of the Filipino lives, it might be supposed that it was logical to be transparent. But sadly, logic did not prevail, and circumstances were not helped any by the refusal of multilateral debtor agencies themselves, like the Asian Development Bank and World Bank, to make public their program analyses and loan conditions. In this manner the people were deprived of opportunities to participate in decisions to incur loans or to assist in monitoring compliance.

Government needs to be reminded: development is not something the government can do for the people but something people will have to do for themselves. The people have to be empowered, however, through deliberate and active sharing of information about the government menu of plans, transactions, and programs. In the interdependence of our life processes, sharing invariably tends to benefit the whole, whereas hoarding breeds subtle tyrannies.

Philippine Daily Inquirer 4 July 1989

environment 5: ormoc & security

ORMOC: TOWARD ECOLOGICAL SECURITY

Junie Kalaw

The Philippine environmental crisis took what is possibly its heaviest and cruelest toll on human life in Ormoc City. According to eyewitness reports by survivors, the waters had come abruptly, almost in the wink if an eye, sweeping everything in its path, a veritable deluge which the camera conveyed as so many bloated bodies floating like so many discarded dolls.

In the comparably torrential rush to absolve itself, the government attributed the denudation of forests in the Ormoc area to logging activities harking as far back as the 1950s, declaring that there hadn’t been any logging in the area in recent years. Media caused more disturbance by reporting intimations from sources within the government itself that politicians, military officials, and Department of Natural Resources (DENR) officials were, in some as yet indeterminate sense, culpable. The partisan character of government’s response once more evaded the fact that ecological responsibility is shared beyond the time-frames of electoral politics; similarly, the readiness of certain quarters within government to blame their cohorts indicates a tendency to pass the buck. But this is the way that government mocks the people’s suffering. We would have been surprised if it got around to pointing out how the geothermal facility in Ormoc contributed to the disaster, for that would have come too close to its plans for Mount Apo in Mindanao.

Our concept of security needs reorienting. We erode fertile topsoil at the rate of one billion cubic meters a year, enough land to produce 10 million sacks of rice. There are 13 badly eroded provinces in the country today that qualify as unrealized security risks. If conditions in one or two areas decline enough to reprise Ormoc next monsoon, will the new administrationsimilarly wash its hands of responsibility?

Disaster relief operations in the country are usually undertaken by the military, who admittedly may be relied upon to fulfill this function. During such occasions, they are said to be diverted from their normal task of overseeing the country’s security. The frequent occurrence, however, of environmental disasters today compels us to ask if the current definition of “normal” military duties requires updating, having been drawn from an old and narrow perspective of national security. Isn’t it time that this old concept be amended to include ecological security, with the army tasked to protect our forests: the navy, our coral reefs and fishing grounds, and the air force our atmosphere?

For far too long, in all countries that have not had the fortune of having a long history of neutrality, the military has competed for resources that have promoted violence instead of peace, its concern being to maintain and modernize its armature, which amounts to a potential for violence. It will be argued, of course, that peace is precisely what is expected to bring about to the extent of adopting a functional rationality in the extreme case of war. However, it may in turn be argued that the concept of war has already changed substantially, as when the government itself speaks of the need to do war against ignorance or poverty, or when an industrial society exports toxic waste to secure its own people’s health, or strains another country’s standards of safety for its own profit.

The idea of ecological security entails the use of information as a weapon and shifts the focus from human targets to natural structures. Securing the integrity of natural structures then becomes a limit beyond which the military becomes obsolete because it will have transformed itself from being an instrument of genocide into a facilitator of the life process

10 November 1991

environment 4: forests left

FORESTS LEFT

Junie Kalaw

Traditional politics dies hard.  Upon Mrs. Aquino’s exit, with the convening by President Fidel V. Ramos of a new legislature and the appointment of a new secretary for the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), the battle continues between those who wish to continue the existing system of commercial logging by a few Timber Licensing Agreement (TLA) holders in our natural forests and those who are demanding a change in the management and protection of our remaining forest resources through a moratorium on commercial logging.

At present 127 concessionaires have rights to about 5 million hectares of our forest.  Sadly, at least 45 of these concessionaires have violated the reforestation provisions of their leases.  Satellite date show that their concessions have open areas of more than 40%.

The logging industry, while it has made a few families extremely wealthy, has been a poverty-creating and environmentally destructive industry.  Foreign financial assistance conditioned on liberalizing trade and investment in our logging industry (e.g., the US$120 million Natural Resource Management Program of the U.S. Agency for International Development with the DENR) perpetuates this social inequality since only the wealthy and well-connected can be market players in the industry.  Claims to employment-generation and dollar earnings from the logging industry only serve to hide the fact that the percentage value added by labor in the industry is minimal and that whatever foreign exchange is obtained from exporting prime natural resources just goes to importations for the wants of the wealthy few in urban areas and not for the needs of the poor communities in rural areas.  Any government serious about poverty eradication cannot allow this to continue and at the same time be credible.

The 1992 World Bank Development Report cites a previous study by the International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO) that discloses that only 1% of commercial logging of natural forests has been found sustainable.   It is doubtful that the Philippines has a higher percentage.  The old forestry profession and academic discipline was a product of the needs of the logging industry, thus you have a number of foresters employed by the loggers claiming sustainable logging of natural forest with no substantive proof to show.

It needs repeating that a continuation of present policies is bad economics, bad social policy, and bad governance.  While the logging industry has been very profitable for TLA holders (according to the Asian Development Bank, the logging industry’s profits from 1972 to 1988 added up to US$42 billion), a recently concluded research study by the World Resources Institute estimates the depreciation of our natural capital in terms of forest, soil, and fisheries from 1970 to 1988 to have been 4% of our gross domestic product (GDP).  The depreciation is even bigger than the increase in the country’s foreign debt for that period, which is about 3.5% of GDP. This is the unaccounted cost that economists call “externalities” and is paid for not by the loggers but by the small farmers in terms of loss of topsoil and water for irrigation; by the small fisherfolk in terms of loss of catch due to siltation of coral reefs; and by indigenous people in terms of dislocation from their ancestral domain.

There are other unaccounted costs.  For instance, there are financial obligations arising from borrowed funds, like our Asian Development Bank loan of US$240 million for a much publicized reforestation program, which was in effect a subsidy for TLA holders since the effective cost of reforestation was much more than the rent captured by the government from TLA holders.  We also have to take into account the irreplaceable loss of life information encoded in various forms of plant, animal, and marine life in our forests and coral reefs.  This information is one of the most valuable resources of our country, which although lacking in financial resources and technological advantage, is nevertheless one of the richest repositories of information which research translates into food and medicine for our future.

As the ecologist Herman Daly points out, natural capital is not substitutable with man-made or human capital.  The needs of the poor have an irreducible physical form and quantity; no matter how many boats and fishing hands we put out to sea, if the fish stock is gone, then Filipinos will have no fish to eat.

Studies of the rainforests in Brazil show that extractive activities in the forest, such as harvesting of vines, resins, nuts, and medicinal plants, yield three times more economic value than the cutting of trees for lumber.  Studies in Bacquite Bay in Palawan show better income (in terms of alternative benefits) and longer-term employment for people from retaining the forest, including fishing and tourism, than from logging the area.

As a positive measure, small community-managed social forestry can be geared to respond to the housing needs of local communities.  The DENR Forestry Master Plan shows that commercial tree plantation can answer the major commercial needs for wood by 1995.  As a bottom line, importing necessary wood requirements from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) open market, with Malaysia and Indonesia as abundant suppliers, is a better option than cutting our remaining forest because logs are grossly undervalued as a resource in the international market.  It is a better use of foreign exchange than importing luxury items.

A politically convenient argument used by the past DENR administration to reject the total log ban bill cites the fact that big loggers can employ one armed guard for every 500 hectares of forest concession while the DENR has only one unarmed forest guard for every 4,000 hectares.  The proposition begs two fundamental questions: “For whom?” and “Against whom?” are the big loggers protecting the forest.  The answers are obvious: for their own profit, and mostly against the poor who squeeze out a living doing slash-and-burn subsistence agriculture, and the small illegal loggers from poor communities around the areas.

This is a diversionary argument often raised by the public relations writers of the wood industry lobby.  Their reasoning is onerous in the sense that it picks only on the last segment of a chain of events that causes the destruction of our forests and in effect puts the blame on the victims of resource-deprivation caused by bad social policies, such as our current forest policies.  The need to provide for the poor’s basic fuel needs is one of the main arguments for stopping the destruction of forests so that forests can be managed to yield fuel wood without killing the trees.

The proposition also goes against our historical experience, which shows that the successful and sustainable use of natural resources is realized when regulations for access and benefits are determined and enforced communally.  This is different from reverting control back to government wherein natural resources are viewed as “free” public goods or part of the political bounty from which it is all right to steal.

The continued legalization of the plunder of our forest resources by a few powerful TLA holders completely contradicts the present government’s announced policy of people participation in the control and management of their resources for their own ecological protection and development.  The continuation of such destructive policies goes against the primary responsibility of government to provide basic “natural” security, by which is meant access to clean water, fresh air, fertile soil, and safe habitat for its citizens.

Ever since our Western-modeled Constitution conferred on the state the exclusive rights to our natural resources, and ever since our politicians built a culture of appropriating these resources as a means for developing political patronage, our ability to use our natural resources to address poverty and ensure a socially just and equitable development for the people has been highjacked.   The pressure on the president to appoint a former logger and a political creditor as head of the DENR, through the gritted teeth of politicians mouthing political campaign slogans against patronage politics and for environmental protection, attests to this.

Manila Chronicle, 7 August 1992

environment 3: forests gone

FORESTS GONE
(In Defense of Kaingineros)

Junie Kalaw

In 1863, after three hundred years of free access to forests for all, natives and Spaniards alike, the Inspeccion General de Montes was created by royal decree to keep track of, and control access to, the forests that blanketed the archipelago.  It was charged with all matters that had to do with the cutting of timber, the opening up of virgin forests, and the selling of forest land.  The discernible goals of forest policy were to (1) provide for Spanish civil and naval needs for timber, (2) contribute to government revenue, and (3) perpetuate forest resources. These goals were not met. Revenues from commercial timber exploitation and forest use were low. Timber could be used freely under a permit but few bothered; illegal cutting of trees and clearing of forest lands for cultivation increased among the natives.  In 1874 kaingin farming was banned and commercial cutting a crime.

Fortunately the population was small and forest loss negligible.   In fact, when Spain ceded the Philippines to the United States in 1898, the islands were still covered with forests, plains and mountains alike.   According to a report of the U.S.-appointed director of the Forestry Bureau, the forests of Mindanao, Palawan, Samar, and Luzon were intact, “waiting to be explored.”

The forest industry flourished under American rule, thanks to America’s huge demand for Philippine hardwood.  Soon enough the forests started to suffer from both destructive logging and kaingin farming.  By 1934 only about 17 million hectares or 57% of the country’s 30 million-hectare forest remained. By World War II the lumber industry ranked second in employment and fourth in value of production among Philippine export industries, with annual government revenues from forest charges averaging Php 2.5 million.

During the occupation, the Japanese took every opportunity to exploit Philippine forests.  Forest stations in occupied territories were made to continue operations, resulting in severe destruction of forests and the devastation of the industry, with 141 out of 163 sawmills completely destroyed.

Upon independence, the state’s ownership of all forest land was affirmed.  Projecting a bias for social justice and equity and envisioning democratic participation, the Philippine Constitution mandated that natural resources belong to the state.  In practice, the “state” has meant politicians and their business partners, and the doctrine has been “what is good for business is good for the general welfare.”

The forestry industry was rehabilitated and mechanized with American help and the exploitation of timber institutionalized through the concession system used by most governments of the tropical world.  Set up for the private management of commercial forests and to allow public authorities to collect revenue, the state controls exploitation through (1) a system of licensing that limits the area and duration of concession to 50 years, including renewals; (2) the collection of fees based on the volume cut; and (3) the enforcement of a maximum allowable cut derived from estimates of sustainable productivity.  Firms capable of setting up or linking with a complementary sawmill or wood–processing operation are more likely to be granted licenses.

In response to U.S. market demands, and to raise revenues for industrialization, the country resumed exporting forest products, with exports valuing Php 3.3 million in 1949.  Early in the next decade Japan stepped up its imports of Philippine hardwood, lauan in particular; from half a million cubic meters by 1952 to 4 million cubic meters by the end of the decade.  Forests were then clear-cut, large-scale, without concern for the future, until 1954 when government imposed the selective logging system on commercial loggers.   Designed as a “sustainable yield management scheme,” it requires the logger to refrain from cutting a certain proportion of trees in the concession, as designated by the Bureau of Forest Development, the residual stand to be managed by the logger, who arranges a second cycle of cutting after a specific growing period.

In the 1960s the Japanese government decided to develop its own wood-processing export industry, treating the forest resources of the Philippines and other South Seas countries as a singe resource base.  Hardwood imports, mainly logs, were processed into plywood in Japan and the best-quality production exported to the U.S.   This trade enjoyed special government privileges since it helped obtain precious currency for the Japanese economy and fueled the development of its plywood manufacturing industry.

In 1969, the peak year of the “logging boom,” the Philippines exported 8.3 million cubic meters of logs to Japan.  Two co-existing systems facilitated the process.  The first consisted of local concerns (Chinese timber merchants who generally managed the logging for the well-connected Filipino concessionaires) borrowing large capital from Japanese trading houses for the purchase of logging equipment; loans were repaid with log shipments.  The second system consisted of joint ventures between local capital and Japanese trading houses, with the Japanese supplying as much as 30% of the capital investment through the back door.

In the early 1970s log exports started to decline.  Despite the selective logging policy, Mindanao had been largely deforested, its high-density dipterocarp stands in accessible areas exhausted.  Logging continued but mostly in Luzon.   In principle, a ban on exports and a ban on logging in seven provinces, later reduced to six, were introduced in 1976.  However, government repeatedly delayed their implementation for “economic recovery” reasons.

Deforestation took place most rapidly under the authoritarian regime of Ferdinand Marcos.  The Japanese system of processing imported Philippine hardwood and then exporting the best products to the U.S. not only earned the Japanese government scarce currencies but also permitted the excesses of Marcos cronies.  When the Aquino administration came into power in 1986, several large concessions, some of them directly connected with Japanese interests, were canceled and a number of people, including government officials, were charged with corruption.

President Corazon Aquino, on whom the hopes of the 1986 revolution were pinned, did not fare much better, unfortunately.  By 1988, according to the latest nationwide inventory survey, Philippine forests had shrunk to 6.3 million hectares or 21% of their original area, with as much as 80% of these remaining forests partly logged over.  The most severely affected type is the naturally-grown dipterocarp forest.   Once dominating the country’s silvicultural pattern, it now stands marginally in (only) 4 out of 12 regions. From 1934 to 1988, the size and proportion of this type of forest declined between 11.1 and 13.6 million hectares to about 1.04 hectares.   In other words, almost 90% of the natural dipterocarp forest existing in the mid-’30s had been either cleared or transformed into residual forest areas, unproductive mossy fields, and open cogon lands by the 1980s.

The problem is essentially an institutional one, having to do with rules of access and control.  The red tape and complicated requirements involved in acquiring a Timber Licensing Agreement (TLA) or forest concession effectively squeeze out small-time operators or community interests in favor of big and influential concerns.   Besides, the prices assigned to standing timber are so low relative to their true market values that logging concessionaires make a killing in “rents,” which is the “surplus” profit available to a logging company once labor, equipment, and marketing costs are accounted for.   Since they incur no costs in producing the timber, loggers’ profits are often far higher than normal capital remuneration, which has led to the overexploitation of the resource.

This would also explain why the selective logging system has not worked for Philippine forests.   It has been shown that while the first cutting cycle is profitable for the private logger, the timber-stand improvement phase is not, due to the long period of time involved in waiting for the second cut.  Thus loggers tend to maximize revenues from the first cut, and then forego the second.   Invariably, when the loggers move on, “informal” forest users follow in their wake to clear logged-over areas for kaingin farming. These are mostly migrant farmers from lowland communities, numbering some 14 million Filipinos.

It is important to recognize the critical nature of this population pressure on the forest areas, which are now mostly in the uplands.   Unlike indigenous tribes that have long adapted to the environment, migrant farmers tend to overexploit the land quickly, using technology suited only for lowland agriculture.  It is therefore not surprising that government has singled out these kaingineros as the major culprit in 75% of forest destruction.

But if there is anything that the ecological crisis teaches us, it is to have a systems view of life, from which perspective everything is interconnected and interdependent.  We need to ask why we have 14 million kaingineros in our uplands and why they were forced to migrate in order to survive.  And we need to ask why only a few well-connected people are benefiting from forest resources.

From 1979 to 1982, loggers made a profit of US$ 820 million (roughly Php 16.4 billion) and the government earned approximately US$140 million (Php2.8 billion) in taxes.  Clearly now, this centralization of access to and benefits from forest resources has directly contributed to the poverty and environmental degradation in the countryside.  At a national level, benefits from forest resources have been used to finance political power through the dispensing of patronage to an impoverished electorate and the buying of military protection.   This has produced a basic anomaly in our democratic system.  Authentic democratic elections are not possible when the voters are poor and depend upon the patronage of a powerful few for their survival.  Ecological consciousness points to the necessity of acknowledging that the right to a life-support system from our natural resources is an inherent human right that must be given to people before the rights of the state and political leaderships can be voted on.

After the authoritarian Marcos regime, any other administration would have had to cope with the problem of poverty and democratic access, including Marcos himself, had he won the snap election as he claimed, and come to terms with the assault unleashed by an outraged civil society.  The history of primary-resource exploitation in the Philippines is replete with the names and interlocked fortunes of politicians and foreign interests, as left-wing ideologues have not tired of repeating.  These ideologues, however, seek to impose a political solution to what is at the core a problem of ecological relationship.  Until this is understood, poverty, as well as the aggravations created by insurgency, will continue to bedevil us.

A HARIBON READER ON THE PHILIPPINE FOREST, September 1989
Philippine Daily Inquirer 26 July 1988