Throughout the Philippine uplands, tribal communities have been forced by more powerful groups to retreat from one site to another, losing control of their ancestral homelands. Impoverished families continue their migratory onslaught to the uplands-primarily due to the failure of government policies and programs to effectively address problems of unemployment and inequitable land and income distribution in the lowlands. Powerful logging and mining interests have created major ecological problems for short-term, inequitable economic gains, leaving behind a depauperized resource base upon which up-land tribal and migrant communities must struggle to survive. Despite numerous progressive populist policies, combined with highly visible dependencies on forests and watersheds, upland communities have little legal control over these resources. Instead, control continues to rest primarily with government agencies and political powers, who maintain the status quo with minimal presence on the ground, or with corporations controlled by elites who often have no stake in long-term sustainable management. In 1988, 1,245 forest concession and grazing leaseholders controlled 5.8 million hectares of public lands, representing a full one-third of the state's domain. Juxtaposed alongside the several thousand, typically absentee, families that have acquired rights to these natural riches, the uplands are populated by over 17 million forestland residents. Only a small fraction of these upland dwellers have seen improvements in their tenure security and welfare as a result of over a decade of community forestry programs (
FN 32). It is these upland inhabitants who have so much to potentially contribute to forest management. They would benefit greatly if empowered as local forest guardians, helping stabilize the upper watersheds for their own resource utilization and for the benefit of downstream farmers and urban dwellers.The environmental problems arising from poorly regulated up-land use over the past four decades have so undermined critical forest watersheds in the Philippines that any further commercial logging will incur direct and indirect costs far higher than any income it could possibly generate. Fire control, natural regeneration, enrichment planting, agroforestry, and conservation farming can begin to rehabilitate the uplands, but it will be imperative to establish effective access controls and local participatory management institutions that only resident communities are strategically positioned to organize and regulate. Unless legally empowered, marginal communities will lack the support, incentives, and authority to act with confidence and self-reliance as managers. The decentralization of management authority to upland communities also necessitates the imminent cancellation of remaining leaseholds currently in the hands of elites, a definitive step the Philippine government has not yet been willing to take. In both Dupinga and Pulangi, logging and mining operations are often backed by local political powers, military outposts, and armed company operatives. In contrast, disadvantaged upland communities have only the support of the church and committed NGOs. No matter how well conceived in Manila, community forest policies will do little to help tribal and migrant communities unless there is strong political will on the part of the government to confront these coalitions of power, which so closely guard the vested interests of the rich.
1. Roy E. Dickerson, Distribution of Life in the Philippines (Philippines: Bookmark, 1975).
2. Nels Johnson and Pablo Alfonso, "Philippines Biodiversity Survey and Action Plan" (Washington, D.C.: World Resources Institute, September 1991).
4. Percy E. Sajise and Elizabeth A. Omegan, "The Changing Upland Landscape of the Northern Philippines,' in Keepers of the Forest, ed. M. Poffenberger (Hartford: Kumarian Press, 1990).
5. David M. Kummer, Deforestation in the Postwar Philippines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 154-55.
6. Dennis M. Roth, "Philippine Forests and Forestry: 1565-1920," in Global Deforestation and the Nineteenth-Century World Economy, ed. Richard P. Tucker and J. F. Richards (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1983), pp. 30-32. Policy Studies.
9. Brown and Mathews as cited in Roth, p. 47.
11. Marites Danguilan Vitug, The Politics of Logging - Power from the Forest (Philippines: Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, 1993), p. 14.
12. Maria Concepcion Cruz, Carrie A. Meyer, Robert Repetto, and Richard Woodward, "Population Growth, Poverty, and Environmental Stress: Frontier Migration in the Philippines and Costa Rica" (Washington, D.C.: World Resources Institute, 1992), pp. 19 and 28.
13. Patrick B. Durst, "Problems Facing Reforestation in the Philippines," Journal of Forestry, October 1981, pp. 686-88.
14. Philippines, Forest Management Bureau, Department of Energy and Natural Resources, Philippine Forestry Statistics (Manila, 1991), p. 35.
15. Eduardo Tandem, 'Conflict over Land-Based Natural Resources in the ASEAN Countries," in Conflict Over Natural Resources in South-East Asia and the Pacific, ed. Lim Teck Ghee and Mark J. Valencia (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 1990), p. 15.
17. Germelino Bautista, "Acritique of the Master Plan for Forestry Development" (n.d.), P. 4.
19. Christopher Gibbs, Edwin Payuan, and Romulo Del Castillo, "The Growth of the Philippine Social Forestry Program," in Keepers of the Forest, ed. M. Poffenberger (Hartford: Kumarian Press), p. 254.
21. Department of Energy and Natural Resources, "Kagubatang Pampa-mayanan: A Primer on Community Forestry Program" (Manila, n.d.); DENR program pamphlet, p. 21.
22. Marshall S. McLennan, "Changing Human Ecology on the Central Luzon Plain: Nueva Ecija, 1705-1939," in Philippines Social History. Global Trade and Local Transformation, ed. Alfred W. McCoy and C. de Jesus (Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1982).
23. "Dumagat" is the regional term identifying the nomadic indigenous people of the Sierra Madre of Luzon. It is not to be confused with the Dumagats of Mindanao, who are not an indigenous cultural group but coastal lowland migrants generally from the Visayas.
26. Personal communication from Mr. Pat Dugan, 22 April 1993.
28. Asia Magazine, 1984, p. 16, as cited in Tandem.
29. Philippines, Environmental Research Division, Fasting for Our Forest: A Case Study (Quezon City, Manila: Manila Observatory, December 1989), p. 5.
30. Lumad is the regional term identifying the indigenous communities of Mindanao.
31. Philippines, Environmental Research Division, pp. 5-8.
32. C. J. Cruz., I. Zosa-Feranil, and C. L. Goce, "Population Pressure and Migration: Implications for Upland Development in the Philippines," Journal of Philippine Development 15,1 (1988):15-46.
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