Category: politics

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 & revolution

if junie kalaw were alive he’d be saying i-told-you-so, just like odette alcantara.   junie and odette were our leading environmentalists, pioneers, who didn’t live to see the great floods wrought by ondoy & pepeng [and some dam(ned) officials] but who warned us often enough since the 1980s that this would happen one day unless we changed, radically transformed, our politics and lifestyles.

i never got to meet odette but junie i knew very well.   youngest son of maximo m. kalaw, the author, educator, and fierce advocate of philippine independence from the united states in the early 1900s.   met junie in ’84 through jorge arago and it was as researcher and managing editor of his journal Alternative Futures that i learned all about the sad state of our environment, thanks to bad government policies.

in ’97 anvil came out with junie’s book Exploring Soul & Society, a compilation of papers on sustainable development published and presented in different publications and fora here and abroad from1986 to 1995.   the first part, Environment & Revolution, opens with a call to empower ourselves a la EDSA.

finally the time has come.   john nery is correct,  the political dynamic has changed, the environment is an agenda waiting for a president.

A LETTER TO FUTURE FILIPINOS

by Maximo ‘Junie’ Kalaw

Our story began more than 14 billion years ago with a burst of cosmic fire and the evolution of our solar system. Ten billion years later, life forms were spawned on our planet, followed by the emergence of human consciousness, which formed and informed different cultures.

Early myths speak of a Being who created us, our land, forests, rivers, mountains, oceans, and all living creatures. This Being — known as Apo to the Lumads of Mindanao, Kabunian to the Kalingas of the Cordilleras, and Bathala to the Negritos of Central Luzon — imbued all creation with a sacred potential.

Beginning in the 16th century, however, waves of colonialism washed over our island archipelago. The Spaniards, then the Americans, then the Japanese brought with a different source of power and revelation about the nature of life. The Divine was driven up to the heavens and life hereafter. Nature was viewed as a mere resource for making mechanistic and utopian dreams come true, legimitizing conquest, exploitation, and two world wars.

Five centuries later we find ourselves at a critical moment in our history. Our survival as a people is imperiled by the destruction of our tropical rain forest, the erosion of our topsoil, and the killing of our coral reefs. We are shutting down, ierreversibly and at an alarming rate, the very systerms that support life.

Yet our population continues to increase, even as more than half of us live on incomes inadequate to feed an average-sice family. Because every one of us owes foreign creditors over Php 3,000, we sell what remains of our precious natural resources at undervalued prices and allocate more than 43 % of our foreign exchange to servicing foreign loans. If present conditions continue, the sustainability of our society is doubtful.

We cling, however, to the belief that grave crisis is a correspondingly great opportunity for change. This crisis is pushing us to take a different view of ourselves, our Inang Bayan, our planetary home, and the process we call development.

It is an opportunity to recover our cultural identity and affirm the values of our indigenous peoples; to create with them an alternate way of caring for the life that flows through all beings; to translate this vision into new forms of villages, farms and factories, transportation and communication; and to live a sustainable spirituality which translates the teachings of great spiritual traditions into norms and ethics that can guide the realities of large wholes and systems.

It is an opportunity to empower ourselves anew, as we did at the EDSA revolution, by participating in decisions that affect our future. We need to create a completely different chapter in our story as a people and as a species where the predominant ethics of our actions will be based on the authority of Nature and our interconnectedness with her, thus empowering us to transform state, party, and church bureaucracy.

It means the exercise of a different kind of politicalwill, that is, a new politics of facilitating the flow of life/resources rather than accumulating it as political bounty. It means the exercise of true service in the noble enterprise of creating a Filipino community within the sacred community of life on earth.

On our ability to transform ourselves rests your future.

Time Magazine, December 1990

the games begin

was going to blog on alex magno’s game-changer series, express amazement at how cory’s death and noynoy’s audacity seems to have changed his politics, and wonder what his bosses gma and fg have to say.   then i read manuel buencamino’s bading post on gary olivar, and someone asked about gary o’s fellow ex-radical alex magno, bumaliktad na nga ba?   and manuel said no, and he seemed very certain.   so napaisip naman ako.   magno has been saying all the right things since cory died and noynoy declared.   Game-changer 5 is a piece i wish i had written.

… Despite all the tinges of retro here, what has commenced is a highly experimental political initiative. The goals are larger than Noynoyfor President. Larger than the presidency itself.

This is no longer about “opposition” versus “administration” — although that continues to be a bogey in the minds of some. It is about new versus old — although that might be difficult for some to even begin imagining.

This political initiative draws its power from voluntarism at the grassroots. That voluntarism can only spring from clear principles about what leadership ought to be and at what standards we ought to hold the wielders of power.

It is about reestablishing governance on a new ethical basis, reinventing government so that it becomes an enabler rather than a hindrance to getting things done. It is about rediscovering a new cadre of leaders who will catalyze the energies of the nation rather than stunt them. It is about neutralizing the old cabal of powerbrokers by calling up people’s power in its most sophisticated, less populist form.

There will, no doubt, be a large dose of emotionalism in this effort. That is indispensable. People will have to be shaken enough to abandon politics as usual and be freed from the traditional habits of Filipino politics. All the disgust and all the anger that have accumulated need to be re-channeled no longer at settling old scores but at building a new scoreboard for governance.

In a matter of weeks, the doors of our electoral politics have been thrown wide open. The new forces must now march in. This is what this experiment is all about.

Until a few weeks ago, the politicians of the old mold and the powerbrokers of the old trenches controlled the dynamic of democratic selection. They hired the best minds from the industry that successfully sells shampoo and toothpaste and deodorants to our consumers in order to sell contrived constructs of political personalities to a dumbed down electorate.

For this experiment to succeed, we will have to raise the quality of the electorate, force them to think about abstract options more than just people in the flesh — or worse, money in the bag. This, win or lose, will be a major step forward in itself.

This is more than just enabling one candidate to win the count over the others — although that, too, is important. This is not a battle fought to be lost. But in order to win, it must succeed in its larger goal of bringing in new forces and new ideas into the electoral field.

The Edsa Revolution was exactly like this. It asked the people to contemplate what seemed impossible because it had become almost an alien concept: be free, be decisive in our numbers, build a government accountable to the people….

indeed.   hope springs eternal.   the game has changed.   suddenly ping lacson has found the courage to denounce erap in no uncertain terms.   tanong ni erap, bakit ngayon lang?   eh kasi, i suppose, ngayon lang naging timely for ping, to defend himself in the dacer case, and to further the cause of unity behind noynoy, why not.   the game has changed.

tanong ko lang kay ping, bakit to-be-continued, bakit hindi pa niya tinapos kanina?   anong strategy ‘yan, in aid of under-the-table behind-closed-doors wheeling-and-dealing, to what end?   or maybe it’s just to prolong his stint on center stage.   whatever.   if as a result erap decides not to run, good for him, good for ping, good for us.

also looking forward, of course, to jinggoy estrada’s privilege speech in defense of his father.   magkukuwento din daw siya tungkol kay ping.   sige sige, let’s hear it all.   matira ang walang bahid.   matira ang malinis.

as for senate president juan ponce enrile’s report that there is no yellow fever in the countryside, not in the north, not in the south.   hmmm.   well.   maybe he’ll be the last to know, just like in EDSA ’86.

mar roxas, way to go!

why was i surprised when mar called a press conference to make his important announcement?   certainly not because i wasn’t expecting him to give way if noynoy decided to run.   i guess what i wasn’t expecting was that mar would make the first move, now na!   and that noynoy would quickly follow, bukas na!   aba, biglang nagmamadali, bakit kaya.

not that it’s a bad idea, kung tatakbo din lang.   i won’t bore you with the heavenly signs (as above, so below), but any astrologer would tell you that it is infinitely better to start anything new this week rather than in the next three weeks.   so mar’s timing, wittingly or un-, is perfect, actually, and the decisiveness, as president of the liberalparty, is quite impressive.   kapanipaniwala na inuuna niya ang partido, sige na nga, ang bayan, kaysa sarili.   not bad atall.   he’s suddenly smelling real good.

i still think noynoy would do better if he finished his senate term first and then prepared to run in 2016 but yeah who knows, rising to the challenge now while the clamor is high could be right too, politically and historically.   at least it makes the campaign for 2010 interesting, even exciting.   no doubt we will be reminded of cory’s people-powered campaign in 1986 — no money, no media.    no doubt noynoy’s people will do even better, given access to media and the example of obama’s 2008 campaign.

but first let’s hope that other opposition presidentiables take the cue from mar and drop out too in favor of noynoy.   actually the only one i can’t see giving up, giving way, is manny villar of the nacionalista party.   so maybe at best it’s going to be a three-way race.   noynoy vs. villar vs. gma’s candidate.   puwede na rin.

unless of course villar and gma start running scared and decide to join forces.   that would be fun, and awesome.