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| Vol. 4, Issue 2 February 2012 |
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Letters From |
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Manila |
Facing the Forests
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| Can community land management save forests—and fight climate change? |
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DORIAN MERINA FOR THE CARAVAN |
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| Dumagat tribal members keep watch at the single checkpoint that marks the entry to their
ancestral forest, which is under threat, north of Manila.
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| R |
OMEO AQUINO GAZED OUT over a Philippine
mountainside that has gone, in his lifetime,
from dense forest to denuded grassland.
He listed the wild pigs, birds and trees that
populated the lush jungle that once covered
these rolling foothills, 60 kilometres
north of Manila. Now that forest is gone, replaced by shacks
with red-tin roofs and cement foundations |
—illegal structures built in the early 2000s. A bushfire rose from down
the ridge, and the pungent smoke of grass, trash and wood
wafted towards us.
The ridge marks the southwestern edge of the Sierra
Madre mountain range, a thick spine of forests that runs
through Luzon, the largest island in the Philippines. It is
home to some of Asia’s most diverse—and most threatened—jungles; scientists have identified more than 70 species of
threatened wildlife in the area.
Aquino, 56, is the tribal chieftain of the Dumagat, an indigenous
group that has called these mountain forests home
from “time immemorial”, in the words of the Philippine
government. Wearing a baseball cap over his wide, quiet
face, he mashed a wad of betel nut in his mouth, momentarily
blackening his teeth. “Our elders used to hunt and gather
here on this hillside,” he said. “This is how the Dumagats
made their living,” Aquino continued, looking down at the
hillside. “But now it is broken.”
In 2004, after a decades-long fight, this small community
of 240 families in Bulacan Province was granted official recognition
and title to the area. The 1,817 hectares in front of
our eyes—the hillside below and the valley stretching to the
horizon—were, at least legally, Dumagat land. But despite a
coordinated effort by government agencies, NGOs and the
Dumagats themselves, deforestation has continued.
The struggle of the Dumagats to protect their forest home
exemplifies the challenges facing the ongoing global effort
to slow the pace of deforestation. According to latest United
Nations data, 1.6 billion people depend directly on forests for
their livelihoods; many, like the Dumagats, are indigenous
groups and poor communities on the margins of society.
Scientists estimate that deforestation—which destroys
some 1 million hectares of forest in Southeast Asia each
year—also accounts for about 20 percent of global greenhouse
emissions. As a result, the fate of local communities
like the Dumagats, fighting to preserve forests, has emerged
as a key front in the struggle against climate change. The UN
has designated 2011 the ‘International Year of the Forests’,
and representatives from 147 nations, who attended the
UN Forum on Forests in New York this February, pledged
a “people-centric” approach to forest preservation, with an
emphasis on poverty reduction.
“There were many wars, but we always came back,” Fidel
San Jose, a Dumagat elder, told me as he sat at the edge of
the village leading to the forest. Nearby, a few of his grandchildren
played with the shell of a tricycle under a tree.
First the Dumagats were displaced by the Spanish, and
then the Japanese, said San Jose. Then foreign banks moved
in and housing projects sprung up. In 1995, the Philippine
government officially adopted a programme called Community-Based Forest Management (CBFM) in order to give local
residents a greater role in decisions—but by that time,
less than three percent of old-growth forests in the Philippines
remained. In the same year, the government hosted
the first regional conference on climate change, and the resulting
“Manila Declaration” included a specific call for forest
protection as a means to slow global warming. In 1997,
the Philippine government passed the Indigenous ‘Peoples’
Rights Act, creating the legal path for groups like the Dumagat
to reclaim their ancestral forest land.
Protecting that legal title, however, has not been simple.
“Our concern now is that the other residents are not respecting
our rights to the land,” San Jose said, noting that a
seven-year-old plan to build five checkpoints along the border
of the Dumagat land has produced only one.
Beside him, Martin Francisco, a Filipino priest who has
been working with the Dumagats since 1996, snapped pictures
with a long telephoto lens. He carries the camera to
document the rampant illegal logging in the area, posting
pictures of a scarred landscape on Facebook and submitting
them to government agencies. Tall, bald and rail-thin, he
sometimes enters the forest wearing a wig to document the
work of heavily armed logging syndicates.
Efforts to protect remote forest land have become increasingly dangerous in the Philippines.
The Department of Environment
and Natural Resources
(DENR) has said that 50 government
workers, many of them
foresters, have been killed since
1990. At least two foresters were
killed in 2010 after seizing illegally
cut logs. The Manila-based
NGO Kalikasan has documented
the killing of 37 environmental
workers since 2001.
Francisco has been subjected to
anonymous threats by phone almost
daily, according to his office
staff. Later, as we walked through
the Dumagat forest, he stopped to
take photos of a motorcycle loaded
with sacks of charcoal and wood;
the Dumagats said they didn’t recognise
the drivers, who lifted their
chins in greeting as they passed by.
A day earlier, in a conference
room at a hilltop resort overlooking
Manila, I sat in on a meeting
of the DENR. Fifteen staff members
were reviewing more than 100 proposals for local forest
management projects in order to allot 150 million pesos
( 153.7 million) from the country’s comprehensive Agrarian
Reform Program.
An argument broke out as the staff weighed the pros and
cons of one of the projects. Some staff members grew frustrated
when specific questions could not be answered. Suddenly, a
seated woman with short hair and a collared blouse broke in.
“From now on we should have someone from the community
presenting the project themselves and we should do the
evaluation in the field,” said Isabelita Austria, the current
national head of the Philippines’ community-based forestry
programme. “Next year,” she said, “we will have presentations
taking place in the field. But right now, this is the process
we have in place. We cannot change that today.”
Austria was appointed to head the programme last year;
she has worked in community forestry since 1979, much of
that time in the Nueva Vizcaya province, which includes the
Sierra Madre mountain forests.
During a break in the meeting, I told her about the Dumagats
and their struggle with basic protection of the forest,
even within some of the government-managed land.
Austria sighed. “People do live inside, even in CBFM
land,” she acknowledged. But she pointed to government
figures that show a slight increase in forest land—to 7.2 million
hectares—as evidence that the forestry programme is,
at least overall, working. (About five million hectares is under
community management.) “The fact that there is a slight
increase in forest cover says that it [CBFM] contributed to
the improvement of some of the areas, in terms of addressing
degradation or improving the quality of the areas where
these communities are.”
Dumagat elders said they had benefited from a reforestation
programme on their land in which the government provided
seedlings and ongoing care, but they also described a
recent government-run attempt to grow rambutan fruit trees
as a failure. After two years, they estimated that 70 percent of
the crop had died due to neglect and poor management.
“It’s been a mixed result,” said Antonio La Viña, who as
undersecretary for the DENR in the mid-1990s, was part of
the early effort to implement the new forest policy. “What
we’ve learned is it’s not enough to just recognise rights—you
have to provide economic incentives.”
La Viña believes carbon trading—which would allow poor
communities to collect funds for protecting carbon-rich
forests—could provide one kind of economic incentive. But
such programmes require international monitoring, computer
models and intensive forest management—capacities
that are well beyond the reach of rural communities like
the Dumagat, who are still struggling over basic issues like
keeping settlers and illegal loggers out of their forests.
Back in Bulacan, I stood with Aquino, the tribal leader,
at the single checkpoint on the edge of the Dumagat land.
A lone bamboo pole stretched across the road, while two
young men sat inside a hut—volunteers keeping an eye on
the gate.
To Aquino’s left, two wooden posts held up a giant banner.
It was a copy of the certificate of ancestral domain, signed
by local officials and tribal leaders in 2004.
“It can be dangerous here because we are far from the
town,” said Aquino. “It’s a sacrifice for us. There’s no payment,
no allowance, no funds and we’re here 24 hours.”
Then he pointed to the certificate behind him. “But this is
our checkpoint and we’re here to protect our land.”
Dorian Merina is a print and radio journalist based in Manila and New York. He writes a regular blog on Southeast Asia.
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