Devolved

The swollen river systems that brought death and destruction to Cagayan de Oro and Iligan also carried down with them tens of thousands of logs from the highlands surrounding the two ill-fated cities.

The large piles of logs lining the river banks are now a familiar sight. We saw this in Ormoc where flash floods took a ghastly casualty toll many years ago. We saw this in Guinsaugon, where whole villages were buried under mudslides. We saw this in Quezon province when slopes slid down on population centers after heavy rain.

Illegal logging is now a major cause of the tragedies that have visited us of late.

This is not startling new insight. We have known this for years. We have lost the major part of our forest cover over the last century as our population grew dramatically and human settlements pushed into the forests.

For decades, until we began to run out of forests, we prided ourselves with the fact that we are among the world’s biggest timber exporters. After each national election in the fifties and sixties, forest concessions were generously handed out to political powerbrokers as payback for investing in the electoral campaign of the winning candidate.

Over many years, logging concessions were the principal currency for repaying political debt. It was the principal source of milk for our costly electoral carnivals, the main source of spoils for the victors. The most resilient political clans we have today built their base on logging.

The horrible body count from flash flooding is the price this generation now pays for the follies of our politics.

Timber exploitation was cheap and the returns fabulous. The “industry”, if we may call it that, required only minimal capital and low levels of expertise. The legal framework for this destructive activity was weak and enforcement even weaker. Forests were simply mowed down indiscriminately and replanting never required. That allowed great fortunes to be built and the weak policy framework maintained.

The post-mortem on the Northern Mindanao flooding has now focused on logging regulations (or the absence thereof) in the ARMM provinces whose rivers drain into the two ill-fated cities. Newly appointed ARMM chairman Mujiv Hataman promised to deliver shortly a report on logging activities in the autonomous region.

That report, hopefully, will not end with just determining who was responsible for the logs that crashed down with the floodwater. It needs to tackle the deficient governance apparatus in the autonomous region and, indeed, the possibly deleterious effects of the regional autonomy arrangement itself.

The DENR may rightly wash its hands of any culpability for the apparently massive logging that has been going on in the Cotabato provinces and Maguindanao. They are beyond the reach of the national regulatory agencies. The autonomous region has its own environmental and natural resources agency.

As with the other components of the ARMM, it is easy to imagine that the regional environmental agency is barely functional, if at all organized. It is, imaginably, incapable of effectively regulating extractive activities of the powerful warlords, the heavily armed political movements and the aristocracy that proliferates in the area.

Herein lies what is probably the weakest link in the effort to conserve environmental integrity and sustainability in the most troubled part of the country.

Devolution in general and regional autonomy in particular weakened the capacity of national government to maintain uniform standards for environmental protection, among other things. The smaller the political unit, the more vulnerable it is to being overrun by the local power-that-be.

This is the reason why, when I sat at the Consultative Commission on Charter Change, I opposed all suggestions to advance federalism even if this was politically popular at the time. Not only will federalism put the nation in danger of a fiscal meltdown by prioritizing distribution of public revenues to local government units, the proposed arrangement will also repose more regulatory power in vulnerable local political units.

The inability to enforce forest regulations in the ARMM provinces is an underside to regional autonomy. In a way, one could argue that the calamity is an outcome of a faulty governance arrangement. The maintenance of that faulty arrangement will inflict more calamities in the future.

It might as well be an indictment of regional autonomy no less.

At the risk of being called politically incorrect, it is necessary to radically review the regional autonomy arrangement. The ARMM, as an administrative superstructure, is probably ill-suited to do what needs to be done in this region. It is a feeble apparatus superimposed on a region of strong tribal identities, a highly uneven social structure, powerful armed groups and dysfunctional local governments. As a badly formed administrative superstructure, the ARMM is not equipped to establish modern governance against the powerful social and political forces arrayed against it.

Of course, Hataman’s report will not delve into this complex and highly problematic context. It will likely confine itself to the worthless details like who cut which trees and futile recommendations like requiring chainsaws to be registered.

Having just assumed control of the ARMM, Hataman is not likely to recommend its dissolution. Like a good local overlord, he will recommend incremental improvements to what appears to be a fundamentally flawed administrative superstructure.

When the ARMM was conceived, some thought of this arrangement as some sort of black hole where all the complex, deeply rooted problems of this area will be appropriately localized and hopefully locked away from the national mainstream. The problem, however, is that the deadly outcomes of poor local governance literally flows out of the territories of the ARMM and kill people beyond its administrative borders.