Enough of all that hypocritical ranting about prosecuting loggers

Everytime a killer typhoon comes along, and hundreds of our people are drowned, smothered, and the tally of dead and missing mounts (if they’re "missing" up to now, they’re probably dead) our authorities – from the President on down – go into the act of looking surprised.

Why should we be surprised? Some 20 typhoons hit us every year, and the tragic results are predictable.

What’s really surprising is the way our government leaders dramatically recoil in well-publicized horror and indignation, claming the usual suspects (who’re guilty, of course) the loggers, whether legal or illegal, and the kaingin farmers, plus increasingly, the squatters themselves.

Let’s consider President GMA’s official statement: "We are determined to make those responsible for widespread death and destruction pay the price for their misdeeds and we shall prosecute them the way we do terrorists, kidnappers, drug traffickers and other heinous criminals." (Applause, naturally).

The trouble is that some of those faces you see, occasionally, in Malacañang. Among the culprits are surely big shot officials and big shot PNP officers, military, etc. How can logging go on without governors, mayors, provincial commanders, DENR officials, and everybody along the highways who spot those trailer trucks with huge logs chained to them?

Sus, certainly the New People’s Army "checkpoints", too, being counted guilty, either for participating in the bounty, or being remiss?

The truly awful thing is that the public seems, year after year, to swallow this drivel about loggers and "their cohorts" being punished. Instead, those profiteers will be invited, I suspect, to the Palace Christmas party or the New Year Vin d’Honneur. I think I saw a few of them there last time.

If, on the other hand, a rejuvenated La Presidenta puts performance where her mouth is, and makes some charges stick, then Mabuhay! . . . but abangan ang kasunod na kabanata, after the dead are buried and the headlines fade.

Why, the disaster caught us short of everything – despite this sort of thing being almost an annual affair. As Sarah Toms of the British Broadcasting Corporation observed (the BBC has been giving our floods and typhoons Winnie and Yoyong deaths in-depth coverage) we’re even running sort of body bags.

Maybe it was the "prayers" that did it. Perhaps the big blow billed as a super-typhoon veered partially away. Yoyong did far less damage than Winnie. Yet, it still left 33 dead (the "Office of Civil Defense" in Camp Aguinaldo said only 13, so let’s get the correct body count, please) and 13 missing (Civil Defense said 19 missing). Measured against the reported 600 dead and 170 missing of the previous typhoon Winnie – the final total will probably top 1,000 fatalities – Yoyong was a disappointment. We must pray harder for disappointments of this nature.

However, beyond prayers, we must act. This time, logging of any kind must be curbed with an iron hand. But judging from past performance, any vows to do so may prove the usual – and annual – joke.

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It was never a big secret that hundreds of Filipinos were going to perish from landslides, mudslides, and the degradation of our forests. Some years ago, Dean Rene M. Ofreneo of the School of Labor and Industrial Relations of the University of the Philippines, in an interesting article in which he accused Japan of "historically" contributing to our environmental crisis – but that’s not the point I’m making today – warned about the "Rape of the Philippine Forests", quoting a 1989 report of – would you believe (!) – the government’s own Department of Environment and Natural Resources which declared:

"The total land area of the Philippines is 30 million hectares. About 50 percent or 15 million hectares are classified as forest land while 47.10 percent or 14.12 million hectares are classified as alienable . . .

"However, only about 6.5 million hectares of total lands are still forested, with an estimated less than a million hectares classified as primary or virgin forests. According to the consolidated National Forest Resources Inventory-Systems Space Pour l’observacion de la Terre (NFRI-SPOT) data, our forests continue to be denuded at the rate of about 119,000 hectares per year. . ."

In short, we knew about the problem as early as 1989. How come we didn’t bother to fix it?

Ofreneo’s theme was that the culprits in the massive denudation of our forests were "many", but the leading candidates are "in the past and present participants in the Japanese-oriented logging industry." In the early 1950s, he said, foreign products accounted for five percent of our exports. In 1966-68, their share increased to 27 percent. "It was only in the last decade that Japanese importations of timber declined because the "harvestable" forests had literally disappeared. In 1966, he noted, the Philippine share of the Japanese log market was as high as 35 percent, but in 1976, it was down to 19 percent. (I remember in those days, I was an energetic early-morning jogger doing – what in my decrepit stage of deterioration, like our forests – a 6-to-7-minute mile. When in Tokyo, I used to jog along the morning streets of Roppongi, the entertainment district, and would espy huge bags of black plastic, laid out by restaurants and girlie clubs on the sidewalk, bursting with discarded "used" wooden chopsticks, ready to be picked up by the efficient garbage men. "Salamabit," I would exclaim in alarm, "there goes our Philippine forests!"

In 2004, though, we ought to by now have stopped blaming the Japanese chopstick users and building industries – so where are our chopped-done forests going?

An Asian Development Bank (ADB) report in the same year also expressed concern about forest denudation: "Soil erosion has become widespread in the uplands and lowlands alike, and is estimated at an equivalent of one-meter deep material over 100,000 hectares of land per year, or about one billion cubic meters of material every year . . . As a result, vast areas of forest and agricultural land have been rendered unsuitable for growing trees or crop farming, (while) sedimentation in rivers, reservoirs and irrigation canals has increased the threat to supply of water for agriculture and industry even for domestic consumption. Nineteen of the country’s 57 watershed areas have been declared to be in a crucial state of degradation . . . Flash floods have become frequent, adding to the risk to annual crop agriculture . . . It is feared that the environmental crisis would continue to worsen as an increasing population becomes compelled to eke out a living at the expense of nature and the generations to follow, causing paradoxically though, a perpetration of the misery of the rural population."

This misery has hit our rural population, as predicted in the past few days. Nature having been devastated is fighting back. Sanamagan. Doesn’t anybody read reports, like those quoted above, in the hierarchy of government – even the government’s own reports? Greed conquers all. And we’ve just seen, once again, the aftermath of the runaway avarice.

It’s becoming embarrassing for us columnists and dishers-out-of-opinion to constantly repeat: Let’s do something now: If we stop expressing that kind of exhortation, we’ll be accused of giving way to cynicism, or, worse, despair. If we believe something will be done, we’ll be accused of naïvété – or, perhaps more accurately, stupidity.

But hope springs eternal.

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THE ROVING EYE . . . I noticed that the otherwise excellent article by our reporter Jimmy Laude on the Gusi Peace Prize ceremonies last Thursday night omitted the fact that the Guest Speaker at the gala dinner affair had been former Senator and retired acting Foreign Secretary Leticia Ramos-Shahani. Letty Shahani delivered the main address at the gathering which packed the officers’ club auditorium in Camp Aguinaldo, while this writer, MVS, delivered what was billed as the "Inspirational Speech". I guess the Gusi Peace Prize Committee didn’t know what to call my speech, since there was already a guest of honor, so they tacked on "inspirational". In any event, apologies to Letty who was the main event . . . Congratulations to the Peace Prize awardees, from our own country, and from Germany, Great Britain, Japan, Hong Kong, the People’s Republic of China, Guam and the Federated States of Micronesia. They’re all great. Their achievements and presence were both impressive and heartwarming. Forgive me for mentioning, in this corner one of them in particular, Quezon City Mayor S. B. (Sonny Belmonte). His real name is, of course, Feliciano Belmonte Jr. My personal reason for zeroing in on Sonny is because I’ve known him longest of all – and, besides, my, well, partners in this newspaper – Miguel G. Belmonte, who’s president/CEO and Isaac G. Belmonte, who’s editor-in-chief – are too modest to heap praises on their dad. So let Uncle Max tell the unvarnished truth about Sonny. Most people forget, owing to his successful career in government – including his having been Speaker of the House of Representatives, and now Quezon City’s slambang Mayor who’s streamlined city affairs – that Sonny started out as a tough newspaper reporter. We were both in the two-fisted but now defunct The Manila Chronicle where I had won my first journalist of the year award. In fact, at only age 17, Sonny was the Senior Police Reporter of that daily, fighting the legendary Ray Veloso of the old Manila Times (then the biggest newspaper) scoop for scoop. Although he’s younger than me, I started out as Sonny’s cub reporter on that Police Beat – and he taught me the ropes, ruthlessly , in exchange for giving him useless advice (since I was also a bachelor myself) on how to court pretty Ms. Betty Go and cope with her father’s displeasure over her even entertaining the suit of this unsuitable suitor. Her father, of course, was the famous Filipino-Chinese writer, editor and publisher of the Fookien Times, Go Puan Seng – alias Jimmy Go to his Rotary Club gang. Sonny was then studying for his law degree – how he managed to work 10 hours a day on the beat while going to law school will forever remain a mystery of achievement – but he won the gal, and, eventually, after much persistence and endurance, he won angry Papa’s heart – much later. For this alone, S.B. deserves the Gusi Peace Prize! Enough sipsip already, even if it’s Sunday. But I sincerely mean it.