Asians See Man Abetting Nature’s Wrath

When monsoons and typhoons strike Asia, as they do every year in the steamy heat of summer, people ride out the storms and eventually take inventory of the death and destruction.

This year, the southwest monsoons have swept out of the Indian Ocean with unusual force. They have lashed Asia from China to the Philippines with torrential rains and transformed the skies into displays of streaking lightning.

As the toll mounted from the resulting floods--more than 1,000 dead, damage in the billions of dollars and legions of homeless--Asians at first found a familiar culprit: nature. Not only was there the quirky weather pattern known as La Nina, there was also the simple acceptance that flooding is a normal part of life.

But now many people see the hand of man in the disaster. In their haste to develop, most countries in the region have paid scant attention to environmental concerns.

“The root cause of this problem is the denudation of our forests. This is a sin of the past that we are paying for now,” Philippine President Joseph Estrada said recently.

Forests are disappearing at an alarming rate across Asia as developers build housing and commercial facilities. Illegal loggers reap huge profits by sending cut timber across borders, and farmers clear land to plant more crops. In Vietnam’s Dac Lac province, for example, the forest cover has been reduced to 15% from 70% in less than 25 years.

“The forests that once absorbed and held huge quantities of monsoon rainfall, which could then percolate slowly into the ground, are now largely gone,” a World Watch Institute report says of China’s Yangtze River basin. “The result is much greater runoff into the river.”

After flooding killed 4,000 people last summer in China, Beijing ordered bans on logging. Premier Zhu Rongji admitted that China’s environmental polices have been “far from satisfactory.”

In the Philippines, Estrada has said he is planning to ban logging. But tens of thousands of jobs in both countries depend on the industry, and the bans may be difficult to enforce.

Illegal quarrying in several countries also has stripped the earth of its natural cover--a practice that, like deforestation, loosens silt that eventually clogs rivers and waterways and exacerbates flooding. Environmental reports say silting has caused the bed of the Yellow River in China to rise by more than 12 feet in the past 40 years.

A similar problem is created by squatters who live along rivers and canals in Bangkok, Thailand’s capital, and other cities. The rubbish they have thrown into the waterways over the years blocks the flow of water and prevents runoff.

The forests that once crept to the doorstep of Manila are gone too, and a few years ago a subdivision known as Cherry Hills, a joint Japanese-Philippine venture, went up on an unstable hillside in one of those once-wooded areas.

Last week, when Manila was hit by its heaviest rainfall in 25 years, a landslide engulfed the housing estate.

“The houses collapsed like an accordion,” said Defense Secretary Orlando Mercado. Forty-eight bodies have been recovered, and about 30 more are believed to still be buried there.

Officials say it is too early to assess the economic ramifications of this summer’s floods. But many thousands of acres of rice paddies have been turned into lakes, 40,000 acres of fruit orchards in Thailand have been inundated, and agricultural prices are likely to rise accordingly--tough medicine for countries that are just pulling out of their worst economic downturn since World War II.

Parts of southern Vietnam are enduring their worst floods in 47 years, with one impoverished province, Binh Thuan, receiving 22 inches of rain in three days. At least 30 people have died, 100 fishing boats have been swept out to sea, and 7,500 homes have been leveled.

In Hanoi, officials say the Red River is rising toward flood stage. The river’s flow is controlled by the Hoa Binh hydroelectric dam upstream, which supplies one-quarter of Vietnam’s power. During periods of heavy rain--such as the city has experienced recently--authorities reduce the amount of water in the Hoa Binh reservoir to prevent flooding in Hanoi. But that doesn’t keep everyone happy because power production is cut back as water levels are lowered and Vietnam gets less electricity.

Forty-three people have died in South Korea in the aftermath of Typhoon Olga. North Korea, in the midst of a five-year famine that some say has claimed 3 million lives, has lost 64 people, international relief agencies say. The news agency of the reclusive Communist country says the grain harvest will probably drop sharply because the country’s best farmland was swamped by the rain.

China puts its death toll at 725 since flooding began in June. The total could have been higher had China not spent heavily to improve its system of dikes since last year’s floods.

Ironically, the two places that need rain in Southeast Asia--the Indonesian islands of Sumatra and Borneo--have been mostly dry. Nearly 500 fires have been burning there as farmers and plantation owners clear land to plant crops.

The haze from the fires has slowed shipping in the Malacca Strait, which separates Singapore and Malaysia from Indonesia, cut visibility in Indonesia’s Riau province to 200 yards and forced the diversion of some flights. In 1997, smoke from similar forest fires in Indonesia caused severe economic hardship in the region and cut tourist arrivals to a trickle.

Even as Asia digs out from the floods, the worst may not be over.

“Our monitoring indicates La Nina will persist until the last quarter of the year,” said Ernesto Verceles of the Philippines’ national weather bureau. “That means more rain.”