Is wood-starved RP getting the message

KUCHING, Sarawak – Can you cut trees without destroying already severely depleted forests?

In the Philippines, Senate President Aquilino Pimentel and Environment Secretary Heherson Alvarez disagree on a total log ban the same issue confronting 260 foresters and industrials, from 36 countries and agencies meeting in this timber-rich Malaysian state.

Kuching is lumberjack town. Forestry’s 10,000 jobs and exports generate half of the state’s revenues. It snaps up new technology. Starting in 1993, Sarawak has lifted logs, by helicopters, from its mixed dipterocarp forests on steep sites.

At this Sarawak conference, all agreed that past rates of forest clearing 15.5 million hectares per decade were suicidal.

Satellite images, analyzed by FAO’s "Global Forest Resources Assessment 2000," show the first-ever dip in deforestation. But today’s cutting rates cannot be sustained.

The challenge is to find ways to meet society’s needs for wood without wiping out remaining forests or creating major upheavals in this industry.

Pimentel is appalled by ravaging of forests. That turned the Philippines, from a "prima donna of timber exporters" in the 1960s, to today’s mendicant wood importer. He’s for a total log ban.

Alvarez is equally dedicated to conservation. A blanket ban, he argues, will only exacerbate local wood shortages. Even now, these gaps have to be plugged by cutting of once sacrosanct coconut trees.

He proposes, instead, a twin track approach: (a) ban logging in the 800,000 hectares or so of remaining virgin forests, down from 14 million in the 1900’s; and (b) spur establishment of commercial tree plantations.

"The long-term solution is not to ban logging but rather to ban bad logging," contends Patrick Durst, FAO forester for Asia and the Pacific. How? That’s the question.

Some people act as if "logging shouldn’t be discussed in polite society," the World Forestry Center’s Dennis Dykstra told delegates. They handle "logging the way farmers treat the slaughterhouse hide it away, in the hope it won’t disturb the customers."

Sarawak is committed to "sustainable forestry," Assistant Minister for Planning and Resources Management Alfred Yap Chin Loi stressed. The conference seeks to improve harvesting or "reduced impact logging."

The term ‘RIL’ seeped into forestry vocabulary in early 1990s. Modern logging equipment, introduced into tropical forests in the mid-1950s, jacked up the scale of damage to soil and residual vegetation.

The Philippines unwittingly provided a model: In connivance with crooked officials, Filipino loggers salvaged, with great skill, in the 60s to the 80s, "the goose that laid golden eggs."

This plunder beggared thousands. It wrecked a world-class industry. Worse, it handed on denuded deserts for future generations of Filipinos. "Go, live in Central Africa," Cebu Gov. Pablo Garcia sneered at green group seeking better ecological policies.

Yet, if RIL were implemented, even by a miniscule one percent yearly between now and 2050, it would reduce disturbed tropical forest area by 150 million hectares. Dykstra pointed out.

One is demographics. Large numbers of natives and migrants live in forests. Even in remote Borneo islands, people use about 62 percent of 383 plants found those forests. Another is cost. Can RIL costs for training and planning be scaled down?

"Sustainable forestry remains an incomprehensible blur," A.J. Leslie of Melbourne University cautions. "RIL contains many Alice in Wonderland phrases that lead to confusion. We must work out what has to be done to achieve adequate RIL, so we know the costs."

With its pittance in forests, is the Philippines left out in this emerging debate on a vital resource? Do we have any substitute for squandered rainforests? Did we replant?

Again, the Philippines missed the bus here, notes the International Conference on Timber Plantation Development.

Ironically held in Manila, Nov. 7 to 9 last year, it noted: the Philippines engrossed in chain-sawing its tropical forests in the 1960s ignored warning signs then of looming shortages.

Abundant God-given resources also led to a prevalent Filipino mindset: "There’s always more where it came from."

There was none. "The Philippines exhausted its natural forests in the 1960s," notes FAO’s Patrick Durst (who is married to a Filipina). "It neglected to develop substantial plantation resources. It is now a significant timber importer."

Philippine myopia may be cloned elsewhere. Even if Malaysia and Indonesia start major plantations now, the conference warned, harvests will be two decades away.

Their advantage of still having substantial timber stocks is being whittled away. It will be "gradually lost to countries that developed viable plantations."

Nations that heeded the warnings are cashing in today. Australia, China, Japan, Korea and New Zealand now sell from plantations started in the 1960s.

Wood from extensive short rotation plantation of pinus radiatus, in Oceania, Australia and New Zealand, have won larger market shares.

Asia now accounts for half of the world’s timber plantations. Nearly 80 percent is in China, India and Japan.

"Four things never return," the old proverb warns. "Yesterday, the spoken word, the sped arrow and missed opportunity" is wood-short Philippines finally getting the message? – DEPTHnews