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

environment 2: state of the planet

STATE OF THE PLANET

Junie Kalaw

We have been blessed with a beautiful planet and a beautiful country but we are destroying it at a beastly pace.

The earth’s green cover is a pre-requisite for life in this planet. It is responsible for converting energy from the sun into chemical energy that starts the food chain. It moderates our micro climate, retains our water supply, and renews our soil. Unfortunately we are cutting down this life-support system at a rate of 12 million hectares (an area the size of England) a year and degrading it at a rate of 10 million hectares a year. In the Philippines, we are deforesting at a rate of 105,000 hectares a year and reforesting only 40,000 hectares a year. From 1972 to 1988, we lost 8.45 million hectares of forest.

Land forms the foundation of our biospheric home. It is our primary resource, one that our tribal ancestors in Cotabato, the T’boli people, believed to have been a gift from the gods through the Batute Bird. This resource takes 50 years to build up to a 30-centimeter height and covers only 11% of the total area of the planet. We are losing it at a rate of 11 million hectares through erosion. By the year 2000 we would have lost 275 million hectares, or 18% of our total land area. In the Philippines we are losing our precious topsoil at the rate of 100,000 hectares a year, which means we will lose 1.2 million hectares, equivalent to 12% of our crop lands, by the year 2000.

Our oceans make up 70% of the total land area of our planet. It is the regulator of our climate and provider of our marine-based food supply and 70% of our oxygen. In return, it has been the recipient of 20 billion tons of garbage ranging from beer bottles to radioactive waste. In the Philippines, we dump 2,700 tons of garbage a year into the Pasig River and Manila Bay. As a result, our mangroves have been diminished from 500,000 hectares in 1920 to 38,000 hectares today. Fifty percent of our coral reefs have been destroyed by siltation, dynamite, cyanide, and muro-ami fishing methods.

Life-giving fresh water comprises only 3% of the total volume of water in our planetary home, and most of them are found locked in the polar ice caps. While there is enough to sustain life in our planet, it is unevenly distributed, so we have large areas with drought, water shortages, and polluted drinking-water supply. There are about 1.15 billion of us in the Third World without clean water. This results in 25 million deaths each year, with children composing 60% of that number. In the Philippines, our major inland waters such as Laguna de Bay — the largest freshwater lake in Southeast Asia — and rivers such as Pasig and Tulyahan are either heavily polluted or biologically dead, and many of the other 384 rivers and 59 lakes are in bad condition. Increasing salinity in the ground water reservoirs of major cities like Cebu, Negros, and Metro Manila is also a major problem. Metro Manila’s water supply is projected to run short by the year 2010.

Climate is an expression of the great interacting realms of atmosphere, land, and ocean. The burning of tremendous amounts of fossil fuel since the start of the industrial revolution has driven up the count of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere from 265 parts per million in 1850 to 340 parts per million today, and could reach 600 parts per million by the year 2050. This has created, in combination with the burning of our tropical forests, a “greenhouse” effect and resulted in the steady warming of our planet. Global temperatures are projected to rise to a mean 30 degrees Centigrade above normal within the lifetime of our children. This could disrupt life on earth because of the effects on agriculture and the polar ice caps.

At present there are about 5 billion people in the world. This number is projected to increase to 10 billion before it peters out to zero growth by the 22nd century. By the year 2000 over 50% of us will be living in cities like Manila. In the Philippines, 14 million Filipinos are squatters in forest areas.

One billion people have no decent housing, and about 100 million have no roof over their heads. In the Philippines, we have about 2.6 million squatters in Metro Manila. Our national shelter gap is estimated to be around 2 million units. While five hundred million people worldwide are undernourished, caught in the cycle of poverty and land degradation, 30% of the world population consume three times the normal food requirement and waste 30% of food prepared.

Environmental degradation impacts on our health and mortality. In the Philippines, the crude death rate in 1983 was 8.2 per thousand population (Malaysia’s was 5.4, Singapore’s 5.3, and Thailand’s 5.1). Infant mortality was 59.3 per thousand, compared to Malaysia’s 20.2 and Singapore’s 9.4.

A June 1988 report to the Department of Environment and Natural Resources which would later be submitted to the Philippine Congress in the early stage of the log ban law-making process shows that with the aid of S.P.O.T. (Satellite Probatoire Pour d’Observatoire de la Terre) we have enough information and knowledge about the status of the various life-support systems of our country. However, its conclusion about the root causes of environmental decay is, at best, cautious and, at worst, self-serving in its evasiveness.

The report focuses on “high population growth and the ensuing poverty” as the major cause of environmental destruction, successfully hiding the fact that the cause of poverty is the social inequity in the access to, and benefits from, natural resources. Our forest resource provides the most glaring example. Statistics given by the Asian Development Bank show that from the years 1972 to 1988, the estimated profit from our natural resources was US$42 billion, which benefited only about 460 logging concessionaires.

Another root case cited is the “unecological orientation of our industrial activities.” This can be traced to a world view of man having dominion over nature, of nature being a mere stockpile of resources rather than a living life-support system, and of wealth as material accumulation and consumption rather than “life flow.”

The report states that lack of “operational knowledge” about our life-support system is the third root cause of environmental destruction. I feel, however, that our lack of knowledge lies more in the area of assessment of risk and of the technologies we use, which are constantly changing.

Finally, the report fails to mention lack of political will in enforcing constitutional provisions for equitable sharing of natural resources and in implementing environmental laws. This lack of political will reflects on the quality of governance and the extent of the leadership’s investment in the status quo.

The Sunday Journal, 13 November 1988

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