Policy is also to blame

Policy is also to blame

Updated 01:11am (Mla time) Dec 17, 2004
By Rina Jimenez-David
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A15 of the December 17, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


ALMOST forgotten in the wake of the nation's mourning for "Da King" of Philippine movies is the ongoing suffering of our brothers and sisters in Aurora and Quezon, and in Nueva Ecija and Mindoro previously, due to floods and mudslides brought on by typhoons and heavy rainfall.

These natural phenomena may have been the proximate cause of the disasters, but as everyone, from the highest officials of the land to ordinary citizens, assert, the deaths and destruction are really attributable to the wasteful and wanton exploitation of the forests.

There's still some controversy whether it was "illegal" (or legal) logging that is to blame for the loss of our forest cover, or the slower but incremental destruction caused by the encroachment and settlement of landless folk on the mountain slopes. Little mentioned in the course of the debate is the role played by national resource policy in the uncontrolled exploitation of natural resources, including the forests.

The issue is discussed in great detail in the introduction to the book "Communities at the Margins" by editors Germelino Bautista and Hiromitsu Umehara in their introduction, excerpts of which are quoted below. (Many thanks to Maricor Baytion of Ateneo Press for the excerpts and commentary.)

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THROUGH particular postwar policies, the postcolonial state maintained and promoted the country's specialization in particular natural resource and agricultural exports. As a case in point, it allocated most of the public lands to the forestry sector for purposes of resource extraction rather than conservation. Apart from granting permits for mining, livestock grazing, and industrial tree plantations, the state issued timber license agreements to private individuals and corporations for commercial logging purposes. Thus, from only 802 thousand hectares (ha) of forest lands released to logging concessionaires in the 1951 to 1960 period, the area under timber license agreements expanded threefold by an additional 3.2 million ha from 1961 to 1970, and another 5.5 million ha from 1971 to 1980. By 1990, the government had granted a total of 10.2 million ha, or about 68 percent, of classified forest lands to timber license agreement holders.

State incentives were given to exporters of natural resources. To boost the production of wood for export, for example, among the incentives were "liberal annual allowable cuts, zero export taxes, low and declining forest charges that amounted to only 2 to 6 percent of log prices from the 1960s to the 1980s, and high protective tariffs on imported processed wood products. State functionaries also provided incentives indirectly by inaction, through the non-enforcement of penalties against logging damages, failure to undertake replanting and forest rehabilitation, and illegal logging practices.

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SIMILARLY there were no policy restrictions for the export of mineral and marine resources. Except for a low permit fee, commercial fish catch and the export of exotic aquarium fish species, fish fries and fingerlings were not taxed. The mining industry was also subjected to low taxes. With the lobbying efforts of the Chamber of Mines, the tax imposed on the industry even declined through time. The mining ban was also lifted in particular reserve areas. Moreover, mining companies received subsidies in the form of price supports, funds for stabilization, and tax amnesty for distressed companies, in addition to the benefits they obtained from government infrastructure projects.

Thanks to these incentives, the wood and mining industries experienced phenomenal growth in the 1950s and 1960s, consequently increasing the flow of people to resource extraction and processing areas in the frontiers where logging-sawmill and mining operations were established. The entry of migrant workers in these frontier areas in turn pushed indigenous communities out of the extraction areas, deeper into the uplands.

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APART FROM THE unsustainable, unmindful levels of natural resource use, extractors did not plough back their rents for the reproduction of the resource base. Despite the high economic rents effectively realized by commercial logging, fishing, and processing industries from the combined effects of a tax regime and the favorable movement of demand and prices, the incomes were not reinvested in reforestation, tree plantation development, fishery management, and marine reserves protection. Instead, extractors converted their rental incomes into consumer durables, luxuries, real estate, and financial assets in the Philippines and abroad.

(Such an economic structure has led to the creation of "core poor"): indigenous communities in the uplands who have been pushed into the interiors by loggers, miners, and lowland migrants; former workers of logging concessions who engage in subsistence production; municipal fisherfolk displaced by commercial fishers; the farm or non-farm workers who have been displaced from a declining sector-industry like wood or sugar; farm households in calamity- or drought-prone areas; farm workers without adequate water or functioning irrigation system; and landless workers who have moved to the coastal areas, towns or cities but remain unemployed by the informal economy.

Indeed these groups have been the most vulnerable to disasters, both natural and man-made, as the horrific tragedies in the recent weeks have shown.

State authorities and various interest groups -- which have controlled policy making and implementation as well as the allocation and use of the country's resources-must be made to answer for these crimes that they repeatedly commit against communities who only emerge from the margins when attention is dramatically called to their plight, often a little too late.