ENVIRONMENT / THE FOREST WAR : Last Stand Looms for Prized Trees in Philippines

The devastation is clear cut.

Only raw stumps stand on the hill where thousands of trees were illegally cut. Down by the beach, thick planks of teak and ebony await a smuggler’s boat. Logging trucks roar down rocky roads, paying their way past military checkpoints. And distant chain saws whine in the lush jungle.

This is Palawan, the Philippines’ largest and most pristine province, where cave-dwelling tribes still use blowpipes in untracked wilderness. But the slender, 278-mile-long island known as the “last frontier” is increasingly facing the last chance to save what little remains of the nation’s once-magnificent rain forests.

“The sad truth is, nothing is being done,” said Joselito Alisuag, a Palawan lawyer and environmental activist. “Logging goes on unabated.”

Amid worldwide concern over shrinking tropical forests, home to half of the known species of life, scientists say the Philippines may be depleting that resource faster than any other country. A recent study by the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) says the Philippines may cut its last remaining primary hardwood forests in seven to 12 years.

It is difficult to exaggerate the impact. Probably half the nation’s endemic forest species are already lost, and one-third of the major watersheds are “critically denuded,” the report said. As the forests disappear, topsoil runoff clogs rivers and kills critical mangrove forests, coral reefs and fishing areas. The erosion ruins farmland and contributes to floods and landslides.

Already, according to AID, the country “is faced by the grim prospect of a decline in its agri-based economy and the weakening of its democratic institutions.” Add to this the fastest-growing population in Asia, the report concludes, and “it is entirely likely that the Philippines will experience increasing poverty and despair and a downward spiral into the ranks of the very poorest of nations.”

“It is not only alarming--it’s suicidal,” says Anthony A. Oposa Jr., a Manila lawyer who sued the government in March to seek a logging ban. The suit has not been heard.

But loggers are not alone. An estimated 18 million people--nearly one-third of the Philippine population--already live in the upland forests. Many are kaingeros, poor slash-and-burn farmers who torch the undergrowth when the loggers leave. After two years, the soil is so depleted that they often move again in a desperate search for fertile farmland.

“Since there is no land reform, they have no land,” said Fulgencio S. Factoran Jr., secretary of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources. “So, they go up, burn the forest and farm. There’s no livelihood for them anywhere else.”

Between loggers and farmers, Factoran figures the Philippines has “five years until our bio-diversity will be lost,” extinguishing a unique genetic and biological pool. That’s astonishing in a lush land where a survey once found more woody plant species on Mt. Makiling, an hour south of Manila, than in the entire continental United States.

The problem is political as well as environmental. The three-year-old Congress has not passed a single environmental law. Many members are closely tied to logging interests.

President Corazon Aquino’s government finally began to move last year. It banned the export of lumber, limited logging on steep hills and mountaintops and banned logging in several devastated provinces. But with few forest guards, enforcement is meager.

Meanwhile, there is growing public anger. More than two dozen conservation groups have formed in the last two years. But the largest, the Haribon Foundation, has only 1,000 members, and its impact is negligible.

Logging obviously is not new to the Philippines. Former President Ferdinand E. Marcos gave his friends lucrative contracts and turned a blind eye to highly destructive clear-cutting. Forest after forest was ravaged.

But the depths of the degradation became clear only in 1988, when a German-funded study of satellite photographs found that only one-fourth of the area that was reported forested actually contained trees. Scientists estimate that fewer than 2 million acres of old-growth forest survives, barely 4% of the original forest cover.