Reversing profligacy's legacy

Are we locking stable doors long after the horses bolt? That's how people, numbed by unrelenting deforestation, reacted to the news report that, after 15 years of bickering, the UN adopted a “Non-Legally Binding Instrument on All Types of Forests.”

Politicians here smudge significant reports. Pardoned plunderer Joseph Estrada “vowed to expose grafters” in a book his ghost writers haven't yet stitched that bagged the evening news lead, ahead of police blotter sleaze. This was a story of 183 nations agreeing to curb a suicidal five percent per decade deforestation rate. It landed in an inside page below the fold.

The General Assembly approved the new instrument on December 17. It saw light here 22 days later. That came in a Foreign Office statement on provisions UN Permanent Representative Hilario Davide cobbled into the document.

Yet, our nerves are still raw from deaths of kith and kin in floods cascading from denuded mountains. Corpses in Quezon, Aurora , Leyte , Surigao underscore what dull statistics tell: In 1575, forests blanketed 27.5 million hectares. This had been razed to less than a fifth in 2001.

That sliver continues to dwindle ask Senator Juan Ponce Enrile. His firm, San Jose Timber Corporation, logs within 97,770 hectares, straddling protected zones, of the country's last old-growth forest in Samar .

In the 1950s the Philippines pranced as a “prima donna” of Asian timber trade. “In it's virgin state, Philippine forests were among the most commercially viable in the world, with outstanding yields of high-quality easily- accessible timber,” notes “Asia-Pacific Forestry: Towards 2010.”

But concessions were recklessly parceled out in the ‘60s and ‘70s. They surged to blanket more than a third of the country's land area. Loggers cut as if there was no tomorrow. Log exports crested, in the late 60s, at 10 million metric tons yearly – and nosedived.

Tomorrow has come. Now, we buy wood from Asean countries, plus Australia and New Zealand – which invested in tree plantations, in the 1970s. Timber imports now cost the country roughly 10 times what it scrapes to export. Consumption burned wealth generated from forests. Only a pittance went for processing or plantations.

Thus, yesterday's timber “prima donna” is today's wood-pauper. The country also become a case study in reverse:-- how not to handle God-given resources.

“The Philippines was effectively the first Asia-Pacific country, in the post World War II era, to extensively liquidate its forest wealth,” the Food and Agriculture Organization noted. “The experience of the Philippines …offers a poignant lesson” for still-forested countries from Cambodia to Vanuatu .

The region lost, over the last 50 years, half its forests. In Asia , gross deforestation exceeds three to four millions hectares annually, forester C. Chandrasekharan estimated before his 2007 death. Over the last 50 years, the region lost half its forests,

“This depletion is historically unprecedented,” he added. “It is unsustainable. Worse, it triggered degradation whose long-term damage can be ten times worse than deforestation. If unchecked, policies and programs will be like chasing the wind.”

Indeed, there's "more to this instrument than just protecting trees," UN General Assembly President Srgjan Kerim said. It reinforce local people's stake in forest by seeking to ensure a fairer share of its benefits.

That should resonate here. Much of poverty festers in communities, clustered in or around forests, or on ecologically-brittle uplands. Initiatives can help the poor break the grip of elites who've creamed benefits from forests. Malnutrition and disease take a savage toll. But death through shriveling away is not the stuff of headlines.

World Bank earlier stressed this need for strengthening of national forest governance” in its new report: "At Loggerheads? Agricultural Expansion, Poverty Reduction and Environment in the Tropical Forests."

Dense tropical forests are often cleared to create pastures worth as little as $300 a hectare, it notes. These unleash large amounts of CO2. Yet, “forests may be worth five times more if left standing.” They provide vital carbon “sinks.” Developing countries should tap this value by improved policies and programs in three forest types:

(a) “Frontiers and disputed lands”. Guaranteeing forest rights is a key to mitigate deforestation, defuse conflicts, and increase incomes;

(b) “Lands beyond the agricultural frontier”: As in Borneo , New Guinea and Sulawesi , quick action to head off the social and environmental impacts of future agricultural expansion is the main challenge.

(c) “Mosaic lands - Here, forests and agriculture coexist. The report suggests drawing on the Global Environmental Fund for programs that help farmers to maintain their forests and shift to agroforestry systems, which offer carbon and biodiversity benefits.

"Global carbon finance can be a powerful incentive to stop deforestation," says François Bourguignon, the bank's chief economist. Is that beyond a Senator Jinggoy Estrada? Do his horizons go beyond sour-graping Manila Film Festival protocol?

The country must reverse a legacy of profligacy – or face disaster sooner rather than later. “Too little, too late is history's universal epitaph for regimes which lost their mandates to demands of landless, jobless, disenfranchised and desperate men and women.”*

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