The problem is legal logging
The problem is legal logging
Updated 11:33pm (Mla time) Dec 06, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service
Editor's Note: Published on page A12 of the December 7, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
I HEARD it in the news at the height of the storm, when Dingalan town yielded up corpses on the shore, along the riverbanks and down the slopes of mountains. A congressman proposed the death penalty for illegal loggers. Illegal logging, he said, was clearly a heinous crime. The people who dealt in it deserved nothing less than execution.
Some days later, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo herself admitted the deaths in Quezon province weren't just an act of God but an act of man, and called as well for harsh punishment to be meted out to illegal loggers. What happened in Quezon happened because the trees that sucked the water in the hilltops were gone, cut off by illegal loggers. While at that, she said the New People’s Army (NPA) was to blame for that pass. They were among, if the not the chief member, of the growing tribe of illegal loggers in the area. Having lost their funding from abroad and no longer able to compel local officials and businessmen to pay "revolutionary taxes," they had resorted to illegal logging.
Illegal logging was clearly the culprit, Representative Prospero Nograles said also. The problem lay simply in implementing our environmental laws, which are plentiful. If the authorities would only run after the illegal loggers, we would not be having problems with the environment. If only the cops and soldiers would confiscate the illegal logs coming their way, places like Real, Infanta and Dingalan would not have experienced the kind of devastation they just had.
Not at all.
Maybe the NPA has gone into illegal logging for the reasons President Arroyo and Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita cite -- that is not improbable. They went into counterfeiting in the 1980s, with disastrous results. But their contribution to the disappearance of the trees in this country, particularly in the Quezon and Aurora areas, is at best marginal. As is the contribution of the illegal loggers who operate in the wake of the legal ones. These are essentially small woodcutters who do not have the equipment to hew down big trees, let alone entire forests. Indeed, who often pay "royalties" (read tong) to the legal timber licensees to carry out their fringe “kaingin” and woodcutting activities.
Blaming the illegal loggers for what happened in Dingalan, Real and Infanta is like blaming the pickpockets in Cubao for the crime situation in Metro Manila. Running after the illegal loggers for the ferocious ravaging of this country is like running after the Muslims in Quiapo to solve the problem of piracy in Asia. It is selective perception of mind-boggling proportions. No, it is self-inflicted blindness.
The figures in Dingalan show so. It was the commercial loggers -- completely legal ones – who razed down its forests over the past several decades. When logging was temporarily stopped in 1995, after 50 years of relentless tree cutting, 90 percent of Dingalan’s forest cover had already disappeared. It had only 2 percent of its old-growth trees left. It did not help that Dingalan Bay became the site of US-RP war games over several years, an exercise that treated ecological conservation along with imaginary terrorists as the enemy.
As Jerome Ignacio of the IRDF reports, logging in the area was revived in 2000, when Joseph Estrada's goon in the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, Antonio Cerilles, signed a "provisional Environmental Clearance Certificate" entitling Green Circle Properties and Resources to log on 27,851 hectares of land, with an annual allowable cutting volume of 22,645 cubic meters of wood from 447 hectares. This means more than 600 10-wheelers full of logs rumbling down the mountains every year. GCPR is the one company that has been responsible for stripping that place naked and by all the laws of God and man should be haled to court long ago for it.
This contravened, as Ignacio points out, an earlier DENR study that said Dingalan would be shooting itself in the head to cut more trees, though it said this of course in more scientific language. Cerilles' order stood till last week. It was not rescinded despite the furious importuning of folk from Dingalan, who have camped out on the DENR grounds on Visayas Avenue repeatedly, led by the former bishop of the prelature, Julio Labayen, himself. And it was not rescinded until Ms Arroyo beheld hundreds of bodies of men, women, and especially children, buried in the mud or floating in the sea. The product of monumental apathy and cynicism.
Illegal loggers? Wrong target, Ma'am. The criminals are perfectly legal ones.
The NPA does not have 10-wheeler trucks that pass with impunity through checkpoints, leaving behind only cigarette money for those manning them. Neither do the indigenous folk who have only their bare shoulders -- they don't even have carabaos -- to haul firewood to their clearings. What implementation and law enforcement are we talking about? How can you arrest and jail people who have permits to carry out their criminal activities?
The deaths in Dingalan, Real and Infanta were not wrought by the hand of God, they were wrought by the hand of greed. We want to stop these tragedies from happening -- and by God it's time we did -- we stop kidding ourselves that the problem is illegal loggers. That is not the problem. The problem is the refusal of this government to recognize that this country's ecosystem, which was already fragile to begin with, has become brittle from unrelenting abuse. The problem is a corrupt government, particularly in the form of officials in the DENR, who turn criminality into rationality, who turn law into an instrument of murder. The problem is commercial logging, which remains unabated to this day, its logs raining death on those who live at the foot of the mountains in the howling wind.
The problem is not illegal loggers, it is legal loggers. The bodies of the dead should indict them to hell.
Updated 11:33pm (Mla time) Dec 06, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service
Editor's Note: Published on page A12 of the December 7, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
I HEARD it in the news at the height of the storm, when Dingalan town yielded up corpses on the shore, along the riverbanks and down the slopes of mountains. A congressman proposed the death penalty for illegal loggers. Illegal logging, he said, was clearly a heinous crime. The people who dealt in it deserved nothing less than execution.
Some days later, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo herself admitted the deaths in Quezon province weren't just an act of God but an act of man, and called as well for harsh punishment to be meted out to illegal loggers. What happened in Quezon happened because the trees that sucked the water in the hilltops were gone, cut off by illegal loggers. While at that, she said the New People’s Army (NPA) was to blame for that pass. They were among, if the not the chief member, of the growing tribe of illegal loggers in the area. Having lost their funding from abroad and no longer able to compel local officials and businessmen to pay "revolutionary taxes," they had resorted to illegal logging.
Illegal logging was clearly the culprit, Representative Prospero Nograles said also. The problem lay simply in implementing our environmental laws, which are plentiful. If the authorities would only run after the illegal loggers, we would not be having problems with the environment. If only the cops and soldiers would confiscate the illegal logs coming their way, places like Real, Infanta and Dingalan would not have experienced the kind of devastation they just had.
Not at all.
Maybe the NPA has gone into illegal logging for the reasons President Arroyo and Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita cite -- that is not improbable. They went into counterfeiting in the 1980s, with disastrous results. But their contribution to the disappearance of the trees in this country, particularly in the Quezon and Aurora areas, is at best marginal. As is the contribution of the illegal loggers who operate in the wake of the legal ones. These are essentially small woodcutters who do not have the equipment to hew down big trees, let alone entire forests. Indeed, who often pay "royalties" (read tong) to the legal timber licensees to carry out their fringe “kaingin” and woodcutting activities.
Blaming the illegal loggers for what happened in Dingalan, Real and Infanta is like blaming the pickpockets in Cubao for the crime situation in Metro Manila. Running after the illegal loggers for the ferocious ravaging of this country is like running after the Muslims in Quiapo to solve the problem of piracy in Asia. It is selective perception of mind-boggling proportions. No, it is self-inflicted blindness.
The figures in Dingalan show so. It was the commercial loggers -- completely legal ones – who razed down its forests over the past several decades. When logging was temporarily stopped in 1995, after 50 years of relentless tree cutting, 90 percent of Dingalan’s forest cover had already disappeared. It had only 2 percent of its old-growth trees left. It did not help that Dingalan Bay became the site of US-RP war games over several years, an exercise that treated ecological conservation along with imaginary terrorists as the enemy.
As Jerome Ignacio of the IRDF reports, logging in the area was revived in 2000, when Joseph Estrada's goon in the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, Antonio Cerilles, signed a "provisional Environmental Clearance Certificate" entitling Green Circle Properties and Resources to log on 27,851 hectares of land, with an annual allowable cutting volume of 22,645 cubic meters of wood from 447 hectares. This means more than 600 10-wheelers full of logs rumbling down the mountains every year. GCPR is the one company that has been responsible for stripping that place naked and by all the laws of God and man should be haled to court long ago for it.
This contravened, as Ignacio points out, an earlier DENR study that said Dingalan would be shooting itself in the head to cut more trees, though it said this of course in more scientific language. Cerilles' order stood till last week. It was not rescinded despite the furious importuning of folk from Dingalan, who have camped out on the DENR grounds on Visayas Avenue repeatedly, led by the former bishop of the prelature, Julio Labayen, himself. And it was not rescinded until Ms Arroyo beheld hundreds of bodies of men, women, and especially children, buried in the mud or floating in the sea. The product of monumental apathy and cynicism.
Illegal loggers? Wrong target, Ma'am. The criminals are perfectly legal ones.
The NPA does not have 10-wheeler trucks that pass with impunity through checkpoints, leaving behind only cigarette money for those manning them. Neither do the indigenous folk who have only their bare shoulders -- they don't even have carabaos -- to haul firewood to their clearings. What implementation and law enforcement are we talking about? How can you arrest and jail people who have permits to carry out their criminal activities?
The deaths in Dingalan, Real and Infanta were not wrought by the hand of God, they were wrought by the hand of greed. We want to stop these tragedies from happening -- and by God it's time we did -- we stop kidding ourselves that the problem is illegal loggers. That is not the problem. The problem is the refusal of this government to recognize that this country's ecosystem, which was already fragile to begin with, has become brittle from unrelenting abuse. The problem is a corrupt government, particularly in the form of officials in the DENR, who turn criminality into rationality, who turn law into an instrument of murder. The problem is commercial logging, which remains unabated to this day, its logs raining death on those who live at the foot of the mountains in the howling wind.
The problem is not illegal loggers, it is legal loggers. The bodies of the dead should indict them to hell.
posted by Dante at 11:39 PM
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