(This series is from the presentation of Fr. Reynaldo D. Raluto on“Integral Ecology Ministry in Mindanao Context” at the 17th Mindanao-Sulu Pastoral Conference in Cagayan de Oro City on November 7 to 10, 2022)
LIBONA, Bukidnon (MindaNews / 13 November) – “What Is Happening to Our Beautiful Land?” (CBCP, 1988). “What is happening to Our Common Home?” (Pope Francis, 2015). What is happening to our Beloved Mindanao?
To answer these questions, it is imperative to listen to the prophetic voices of Earth sciences. The Filipino Catholic bishops rightly argues: “those who study ecology … are in a good position to tell us what is happening since they study the web of dynamic relationships…”[1] Along this line, Pope Francis invites us to draw “on the results of the best scientific research available today, letting them touch us deeply and provide a concrete foundation for the ethical and spiritual itinerary that follows.”[2]
Inadequate Forest Cover
Let us allow our nostalgic remembering and creative imagining of the past to help us re-construct the remote history. We were told that “The first Christian missionaries saw trees extending from the shores to the mountaintops, and likened the country to a paradise. … Forests made up 27.5 million hectares or 92% of the country’s total land area in the 16th century, when Spanish colonizers arrived.”[3]
The Environmental Science for Social Change (ESSC) has done a helpful study on the alarming decline of the Philippine forest cover when the US colonizers occupied the country. Accordingly, “Estimates place forest in the Philippines in 1900 at 21 million hectares or 70% of the total land area,” 18 million hectares or 60% in 1920s, 15 million or 50% in 1950s, and 10.2 million hectares or 34% in 1970s.[4]
During the Martial Law years (1972-1981) of Ferdinand E. Marcos, Sr., Timber License Agreements (TLAs) were rewarded to his relatives and cronies who “did not adopt selective logging, … cleared forests, did not replant, and even went beyond their concession areas.” Because the authoritarian government has legally empowered the loggers to exploit the forest, it “further shrank to 6.4 million hectares just after the 1986 People Power Revolution. Since then the country’s forest cover hovered at just under 7 million hectares on average,”[5] or about 24% of the total land area.
According to the DENR, “forests should cover 54% of our land”[6] in order to maintain an ecologically sustainable and healthy country. Thus, when the MSPC-1 took place in 1971, the Philippines had already failed to meet the required forest cover.
As of now, there is no available published data yet on the total land cover of Mindanao Island. Nevertheless, some authors say that only 21% of Mindanao is covered by forest.[7] This makes Mindanao highly vulnerable to ecological calamities in the face of climate emergency.
Unsustainable Land Use and Destructive Agricultural Practices
When trees are gone, other ecological problems occur. “Once the big commercial loggers have chopped down the commercially viable trees, they abandon the area. But they leave logging roads that … serve as ‘the arteries of forest destruction.’ … Poor shifting agriculturalists ‘will only penetrate into areas that loggers have opened up because of the roads.’”[8] Thus, it appears that the unsustainable logging had systematically prepared the scene for large-scale monoculture agribusiness.
The Department of Agriculture (DA) affirms that only about 40% of land in Mindanao is classified as alienable and disposable while the remaining 60% is “Forestland, which is either strictly protected areas or government regulated forest management areas.”[9] In the case of Bukidnon, which is duly recognized as a “watershed province” of Mindanao, perhaps maintaining just 60% forest cover of its total land area would not be enough. Sadly, the recent survey reveals that around 59% of its total area is upland and that only 35% of that remained forested. In other words, “almost two thirds of the Bukidnon uplands are denuded.”[10] Furthermore, about 92 percent (or 380,332.75 hectares) of its Alienable and Disposable Land has already been utilized for agricultural production.[11]
In January 2010, Congress passed a law creating a Mindanao Development Authority (MinDA), which points to agribusiness as a major area for economic development. For this reason, about one-third of Mindanao’s land area has been devoted to agriculture. There is an ongoing land conversion in Mindanao due to the expansion of pineapple, banana, coffee, coconut, corn, mango, rice, and sugar cane plantations.[12]
The extensive monocropping patterns of agribusiness firms dependent on high levels of chemical applications cause depletion of soil nutrients. Their cultivation patters erode the soil to the effect that the badly damaged soil would not be able to sustain any other crops for many years. Their colonizing presence did not alleviate the poor. They have even displaced countless indigenous communities who were forced to move to the margins “where the last patches of the primary forest remained.”[13]
Irresponsible Mining
It can be recalled that the Mining Act of 1936 was the first major mining law in the country. The passage of Republic Act 7942, otherwise known as the Philippine Mining Act of 1995, on March 3, 1995, paved the way for the mining liberalization policy in the Philippines. Republic Act 7076, signed on June 27, 1991, provides for the creation of “Minahang Bayan” to be governed by the Provincial Mining Regulatory Board.
It has been reported that, in the Philippines, “95 percent of mining companies practice open-pit mining” which causes “massive destruction of forest ecosystems.”[14] In Mindanao, Caraga hosts the largest number of operating mines of any region. As a favorite destination of this extractive industry, Caraga is hosting at present “15 large-scale mining companies from China, Japan, Hong Kong, and Australia, with eight more in the pipeline. All in all, at least 62 mining companies maintain offices in the region.”[15] As Caraga Watch pointed out, “close to 5% of the entire land area in Caraga Region, or about 85,132.85 hectares, are being mined for nickel, chromite and gold.”[16]
Alarmingly, “49% of mining projects in the Philippines are in conflict with registered ancestral domains.”[17] In Mindanao, the “fifteen biggest mining operations cover up to 131,775 hectares of land, which are situated on or near Lumad communities.”[18] This largely explains why mining activities in Mindanao are closely associated with peace problems and Lumad persecution. This unrest has been used to justify the heavy militarization in Mindanao.
Polluted Rivers
The Philippines is gifted with 59 natural lakes and 421 principal river basins, of which 18 are major river basins. Eight of these major river basins are found in Mindanao.[19] “Mindanao” is a Maguindanawon word which means “land of lakes.”
Indeed, six of these eight major river basins have their sources from Bukidnon, namely: (1) the Pulangi River, which originates from Kalabugao mountains (Impasug-ong) and traverses 18 Bukidnon municipalities as it flows to the Cotabato provinces where it becomes the Rio Grande de Mindanao, the country’s second largest river; (2) the Tagoloan River, which has its source in Malaybalay and flows toward Macajalar Bay in Tagoloan of Misamis Oriental province; (3) the Cagayan River, which originates from Talakag and drains toward Macajalar Bay of Cagayan de Oro City; (4) the Maridugao River, which has its source in Talakag and flows towards the edges between the boundary of Bukidnon and Lanao del Sur provinces; (5) the Salug-Davao River, which emerges from San Fernando and drains towards Davao province; and (6) the Agusan-Cugman River, which originates from Kitanglad mountain ranges (west of Lantapan) and flows towards Macajalar Bay of Cagayan de Oro City. Sadly, many of these rivers are heavily polluted.
A study conducted by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) showed that out of the 421 Principal Rivers in the country, 180 are already heavily polluted, and 50 are biologically dead.[20] The extensive monocropping patterns of agribusiness firms that desperately depend on high levels of chemical applications depletes the soil nutrients. Their unsustainable practices are chiefly responsible for massive soil erosion that causes siltation of many rivers and other soil-related ecological disasters.
One major freshwater type of pollutant is toxic synthetic agro-chemicals such as fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. Their pollution is so pervasive to the effect that they contaminated both the surface water and groundwater. The mismanagement of wastes from livestock agriculture is polluting our creeks and rivers. The survey conducted by the National Water Resources Board (NWRB) affirms that 35% of our rivers and surface water areas that are potential sources of drinking need to be chemically treated completely first before they become potable.[21]
Considering the interdependence and network of river catchments, Bukidnon forest cover is ecologically responsible for protecting its low-lying neighboring provinces from possible water crisis, floods, and droughts. Thus, in the face of today’s abnormal situation brought about by climate emergency, the residents of the low-lying provinces in Mindanao (especially the provinces of Misamis Oriental, Davao, Cotabato, Agusan del Norte, and Lanao del Sur) are ecological stakeholders of the Bukidnon watersheds as they would either benefit from their healthy ecosystem services or be tragically affected by their hazardous ecological state.
[MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. Reynaldo D. Raluto is currently the parish priest of Jesus Nazareno Parish in Libona, Bukidnon in the Diocese of Malaybalay. He has also been serving as chair of the Integral Ecology Ministry of his Diocese since June 2022. Fr. Rey holds a doctorate in theology from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium) in 2011. Since 2011, he has been serving as Academic Dean of St. John Vianney Theological Seminary in Cagayan de Oro where he also teaches fundamental/systematic theology and Catholic social teaching. Among his ecological advocacies are planting/growing Philippine native trees, mountain climbing, and active participation in the cultural and ecological activities of the indigenous people apostolate (IPA) of the Diocese of Malaybalay. He is the author of the book Poverty and Ecology at the Crossroads: An Ecological Theology of Liberation in the Philippine Context (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2015)|
(To be continued)
[1] Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), What is Happening to Our Beautiful Land? (Tagaytay, January 29, 1988).
[2] Pope Francis, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home (Pasay City: Paulines Publishing House, 2015), no.15.
[3] Karol Ilagan, “7M hectares of Philippine land are forested — and that’s bad news,” Center for Investigative Journalism (May 12, 2021); online: https://pcij.org/article/5628/the-philippines-has-7m-hectares-of-forests-why-thats-bad-news.
[4] Environmental Science for Social Change (ESSC), Decline of Philippine Forest; online: http://download.essc.org.ph/decline-booklet_dgrd.pdf.
[5] Ilagan, “7M hectares of Philippine land are forested;” cf. Pedro Walpole, Figuring the Forest Figures: Understanding Forest Cover Data in the Philippines and where we might be proceeding; http://download.essc.org.ph/forest/ESSC-PWalpole_Figuring%20forest%20figures_reduced_.pdf.
[6] Cited in “The Contemporary Philippines Situation,” in Acts and Decrees of the Second Plenary Council of the Philippines, 20 January — 17 February 1991, pages 277.
[7] See Eduardo C. Tadem, “Heightened Development and Persistent Distress: The Mindanao Political Economy,” in Jose Jowel Canuday and Joselito Sescon, eds., Transfiguring Mindanao: A Mindanao Reader (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2022), 403-448, on p. 432.
[8] Robin Broad and John Cavanagh, Plundering Paradise: The Struggle for the Environment in the Philippines (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 46.
[9] Department of Agriculture, Mindanao Inclusive Agriculture Development Project: Environmental and Social Management Framework (October 2021), pp. 16-18.
[10] Andres Ignacio, “The Bukidnon We do not Know”; available online: https://essc.org.ph/content/archives/10157/?fbclid=IwAR08UuDNltaD6G90jgOpqSQ8lkEhN–hbexyMfg5V9R0ROoOiqXsiSCz6RY.
[11] See Province of Bukidnon, “Economy” May 4, 2012; available online: https://bukidnon.gov.ph/2012/11/19/agriculture/
[12] See Department of Agriculture, Mindanao Inclusive Agriculture Development Project (MIADP), October 2021, pp. 16-18; online: https://www.da.gov.ph/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/MIADP-P173866-ESMF-10-2021.pdf
[13] Ignacio, “The Bukidnon We do not Know.”
[14] Jonathan L. Mayuga, “Is Responsible Mining Possible?” Business Mirror (February 22, 2017).
[15] Aries Rufu, “Mining in Caraga: Holding on to an Empty Promise,” Rappler (March 2, 2009).
[16] Caraga Watch, “Stop Exploiting the Environment! Stop exploiting mine workers!” MindaNews (April 22, 2017).
[17] Legal Rights and Natural Resources Center, State of Indigenous Peoples Address 2022 Report; online: https://www.canva.com/design/DAFPiR3JAyA/pucLDvwCiJZl8loQA0Zljw/view?utm_content=DAFPiR3JAyA&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link&utm_source=viewer.
[18]Ibon Resources, “Fifteen Biggest Mining Operations in Mindanao” (October 26, 2015); online: http://www.ibon.org/includes/resources/Picture%202.png (accessed: October 12, 2019).
[19] See Mindanao Development Authority, “Integrated River Basin Management in Mindanao Pushed,” Official Gazette (June 8, 2011); https://www.officialgazette.gov.ph/2011/06/08/integrated-river-basin-management-in-mindanao-pushed/.
[20] Cited in Michael A. Bengwayan, “Many Philippine Rivers Are Dying,” Eurasia Review (April 29, 2019); https://www.eurasiareview.com/29042019-many-philippine-rivers-are-dying-oped/; cf. Environmental Science for Social Change, “Follow the Water,” https://essc.org.ph/content/view/647/153/.
[21] Environmental Science for Social Change, “Follow the Water.”
