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SENATE
Minority Leader Aquilino Pimentel prodded President
Arroyo to certify the long-overdue log ban bill as an
administration measure so Congress would put it on top
of its agenda and push it faster for approval.
In a
statement, Pimentel said Congress and Malacañang should
“make the protection and preservation of the forests a
centerpiece of the government’s master plan to mitigate
the deleterious effects of global warming.”
Despite
the urgent need for a total log ban to give the forests
a much-needed breathing space, Pimentel decried
legislation has been repeatedly blocked by powerful
logging interests since the bill was first proposed in
1987.
“It’s
about time Congress mustered the political will to
approve the log ban bill. We must put the survival of
our forests and preservation of ecological balance over
and above the selfish economic interests of a privileged
few,” he said.
Pimentel
said this obstruction by a few rich loggers is despite
disasters resulting from continuing forest destruction
like drought, killer floods, farm soil erosion and
landslides. Illegal logging has been reported to have
been renewed in the Sierra Madre mountains, the
provinces around Lake Lanao, and other critical areas.
He noted
that the return of illegal logging in the Sierra
Madre—denounced by Catholic bishops in Quezon
province—was in defiance of the “total log ban” policy
declared by Mrs. Arroyo following the catastrophic
flashfloods and landslides in Aurora and Northern Quezon
in December two years ago that killed more than a
thousand people.
Pimentel
has revived his proposal (Senate Bill 275) for a 25-year
commercial logging ban—the length of time it takes for
hardwood trees to mature. “It is expected that within
this period, the country will be able to regain its lost
forest cover.”
“Unless
we implement a total log ban, we will continue to lose
more of our already depleted forests. And the horrible
tragedies in Aurora-Quezon in 2004, Guinsaugon [Southern
Leyte] in 2006 and Ormoc in 1991 due to flashfloods and
landslides, are bound to be repeated,” he said.
The
deterioration of watershed areas, depletion of ground
water resources, siltation and drying up of rivers and
other inland waterways, and the shrinking wildlife
sanctuaries “graphically illustrate the critical state
of the country’s forests,” he said.
In 1900,
an estimated 21 million hectares of the country’s total
land area of 30 million hectares had forest cover.
Current available data, he said, shows this is down to 7
million hectares today and only about 800,000 hectares of this area consists of old-growth or virgin forests.
Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR)
data show that about 200,000 hectares of forests areas are destroyed annually through legal and illegal
logging, as well as slash-and-burn (kaingin) farming.
Pimentel’s bill provides that the cutting of old-growth
trees should be strictly prohibited. He said the
country’s wood requirements for construction,
paper-making and other purposes will be sourced from
industrial tree plantations.
He said
selective logging policy has been ineffective in
protecting the forests because of the common malpractice
of loggers cutting trees even in areas not covered by
their timber permits and their poor reforestation
records.
In
Mindanao, environmental experts have warned that
Lake Lanao—the
biggest freshwater lake and main source of power in
Mindanao—could disappear in 25 years unless the surrounding watershed areas are
protected from loggers. |
