(First of a series)
MANILA, Philippines - Time is running out on the country’s natural forests.
“The situation has now become grim,” warned Adolfo Revilla Jr., former dean of the University of the Philippines Los Baños (UPLB)-College of Forestry and Natural Resources (CFNR).
In his book just off the press, Revilla quoted the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) as having sounded the alarm in a pastoral letter in January 1988.
“It is late in the day and many changes have already been done. No one can pinpoint the precise moment when these damages become irreversible and the collapse of this living world becomes imminent. Even now there are signs of stress in every corner of our land,” he wrote.
“As we look at what is happening and think of the horrendous consequences for the land and the people, we would do well to remember that God, who created this beautiful land, will hold us responsible for plundering it and leaving it desolate.”
Indeed, the country’s forest landscape has become disturbing.
As of 1997, only 5.4 million hectares of natural forests had remained from the 27.5 million hectares that mantled the country’s total land area of 30 million hectares during the early decades of the Spanish empire.
In a footnote in his new book titled “Sustainable Forest Management in the Philippines,” Revilla wrote: “There is evidence that tree cover has increased over the past decade (after 1997) but these are low quality patches of ‘forest’, the second-growth forests continue to decline.”
By 1920, when there were only about 12 million Filipinos, some 18.7 million hectares of natural forests (62 percent of the Philippines’ land area) had remained. This was further trimmed down to 17 million hectares in 1934.
The “dark decades” of Philippine forestry unfolded from 1960 to 1980. By 1967, the country’s forest area had precipitously plunged to 10.4 million hectares, further sliding to 9.1 million in 1972, then 7.4 million in 1980 and to only 5.4 million hectares in the 1990s when the population had ballooned to 70 million.
“From a forest-rich country, the Philippines has become one of the worst 11 cases in terms of per capita forest cover (PCFC) among the countries in the tropical world,” Revilla lamented in his 597-page book published by the Society of Filipino Foresters.
The seven-part volume caps the son of Dingras’ (Ilocos Norte) career starting from a student to a teacher and forestry professional in nine countries since 1957.
The facts and figures concerning Philippine forestry are indeed unsettling:
* The Philippine PCFC, only 0.072 hectares in 1951, is more than 23 times worse than that of the Asia-Pacific region; 13 times worse than that of Africa; and 10 times worse than that of the tropical world.
* The country continues to lose some 100,000 hectares of forest cover annually.
* The depletion of natural forests, other resources (including soil, water, and flora and fauna, some of which are rare, threatened, endangered and some with medicinal and other values) are lost or degraded in the process.