Opening of public lands for agri-developments

For many decades, vast tracts of forest lands are damaged across the Philippines. These are either the handiwork of nature like soil erosions, landslides, tremors or they're simply man-made due to humans' greed for immediate cash if only to survive.

By all means, those who are within the proximity of the forests are free to do whatever they thought was best for them to survive or earn fast cash.  Notably, the most common practice that upland dwellers do is the cutting of firewood, slash-and-burn farming to plant crops even if these activities run counter to established forestry regulations that forbid them from doing these activities without permission from the authorities. Without a land of their own, they have to do it anyway. While some armed groups would simply engage themselves in illegal logging activities for profits. Forestry reports said that they even encroach on other's logging concessions to cut trees for sale to interested buyers.

When I was working with the Ministry of Natural Resources then, I had the opportunity to join a group of inspectors who was dispatched to do onsite inspection on the sawmill in Borongan, Eastern Samar. We knew first hand that the sawmill we're going to inspect was owned by a lawmaker from Cagayan Valley. From the information I gathered at the site, we learned from some sawmill workers that illegal logging activities were rampant in Eastern Samar. And why not? As the Land Cruiser vehicle that brought us from Tacloban City airport to the sawmill site passed the winding and rugged road on our way to the site in Borongan, we witnessed pieces of illegally cut logs could be found along the road. A sawmill official who was with us confirmed those logs were up for sale.

From the air, I had the opportunity to witness the patches of degraded forest lands while on my way to Cagayan Valley in northern Luzon many years ago. If I wasn't mistaken, those areas were located somewhere around the slopes of the Sierra Madre mountains. Therefore, it is no wonder that during heavy rains, most parts of Nueva Vizcaya, Quezon and Rizal provinces are oftentimes flooded as there were no more trees and vegetation that prevent the deluge of water rampaging downhills. As proof, the recent rash of typhoons wherein typhoon Ulysses brought huge damages to Metro Manila, especially Marikina City, because excess water from those big dams were dumped indiscriminately thereby ending up into the Marikina River which swelled up so fast. Consequently, most parts of Marikina City and other surrounding areas were heavily flooded, causing billions of damages to properties to the chagrin of millions of city dwellers and city officials alike.

Whether or not the government wanted to stop people from encroaching on public forest lands, it can't. This is simply because the forests are the source of livelihood for most upland dwellers. To solve this recurring problem, the Bureau of Forest Development (BFD) thought about granting stewardship to those who are interested to plant vegetables, fruit-bearing trees and root crops, but this program only allowed a small number of applicants to be accommodated. As the saying goes: "Many applied but only few were chosen."

It is public knowledge that there are still many public lands across the country right now. But the government is adamant to open them up for occupancy for fear that its positive expectations won't be met. Consequently, some upland dwellers are forced to do what's necessary for them to survive. While some people stick to where they live, others would just pack up and travel to cities to find other opportunities.

Perhaps, the national government should come up with possible alternatives so that hopeless rural dwellers will find a way to keep themselves busy even in the rural areas. By allowing them to cultivate and do some farming activities on public lands for a certain period of time may possibly allow disgruntled people to stay where they are, especially in these pandemic times when the movements of people were restricted in some communities.

If I knew, there are many alienable and disposable lands that the government can open up where the public may be allowed to apply for stewardship. And these public lands are just yawning and unproductive for so many decades now, just waiting to be tapped for productive purposes.

While this has yet to be done, the poverty incidence in the country will all the more gets worse on a daily basis. Besides, this could be aggravated by the swelling number of jobless people now due to business shutdowns where many workers were laid off or their working hours cut down due to the surge of the pandemic.