Logging Ban 2: The Conclusion

Blogger's Note: This is Mr. Cruz's conclusion on logging ban. Even though I support the idea of a logging ban, I'm still hesitant to whether support total or selective. My only problem with this article is the use of other countries' experience as an example, especially well-to-do countries such as Japan and USA. He should have based on the actual experiences in our own country. I would like to challenge those persons/organizations who are against issuing in our country a log ban to show proofs that their practices are not detrimental to our natural resources. Another point I would like to raise is that for any logging company to continue, they should provide performance bonds and other market-based instruments that make sure they are really planting trees or making sure their practices are sustainable. I read from a brochure of a well-known furniture maker that they only use trees from areas that really replace/replant trees they cut which is certified by a third party. Why can't we do it here?

Logging ban will make building houses cheaper
Posted 00:18am (Mla time) Mar 02, 2005
By Neal Cruz, Inquirer News Service

WHAT my column last Monday was driving at is that the Philippines and all the Filipinos (not only the loggers) will earn more from our forests, if we preserve them for people to enjoy instead of cutting them as we are doing now. So the argument that jobs, export income and taxes from the wood industry would be lost with a logging ban does not hold water.

Workers who lose their jobs killing trees would get better-paying and more honorable jobs in tourism and the government would get more in foreign exchange and in taxes. And the forests would remain there for decades and decades, continuing to earn money long after the loggers would have run away with their loot and the mountains have become bald and eroded had these forests been mowed down. This is not conjecture. Other countries -- Africa, the United States, Canada, Japan, for example -- are earning more from their forests and wild animals that they saved than they ever could have earned had they cut and killed them.

The wood producers say local prices of wood would rise because we would have to import our wood requirements. I think that is one reason our forests are being denuded fast: wood is so cheap here that we are wasteful in its use, particularly the construction industry. Form lumber used in scaffolding for just one residential house is enough to lay waste one small forest. Other countries that value their wood use instead recyclable steel for scaffolding. Big Filipino contractors are just beginning to do that now; others still waste so much wood.

Local furniture makers still use the tropical hardwood narra for cheap furniture because we can still harvest narra from our forests. Other countries that have to import tropical hardwoods value them very much and use them only for very expensive furniture and accents.

Japan, which has extensive bamboo and pine forests, import wood even for their chopsticks. They only look at and enjoy their bamboo and pine forests instead of cutting them, in the process earning much more from domestic and foreign tourists than what they spend importing wood.

Expensive wood and scarce supplies would make tree farming more profitable and attractive. Those denuded areas would become tree farms. Tree farming for wood is a profitable industry in Canada and the United States, which export their wood and paper products.

Even so, the world's construction industry is using less and less wood and using more and more concrete, steel and petrochemical substitutes. In the New England states in the US East Coast, cottages in the quaint villages still look like they are made of wood but they are not. The clapboard walls look like planks of wood, complete with wood grains and whorls but they are made of plastic, nylon and other petrochemical substitutes. Floors and room walls may look like marble, brick, granite, tile, stucco and again wood, but they are really made of hard plastic.
Bathroom units, complete with bathtubs, toilet, sink, etc. are molded in one piece, also of the same materials, thanks to the US petrochemical industry, which uses the byproducts of oil refineries.

These materials have many advantages over wood. They are light, cheap, don't rot, are impervious to termites and fungi, come in different colors so you don't have to paint them. They make the cost of a house very inexpensive. Needless to say, they would be very useful in the Philippines where the cost of even a modest house is beyond the reach of many families. Also, they are the answer to termites, fungi and dry rot that make short work of wooden houses here. We planned to put up a petrochemical plant in Bataan to use the byproducts of the oil refineries but weren't sure what products to make. Well, those petrochem construction materials I mentioned, if produced here, would revolutionize our construction industry.

Wood producers also say that legal loggers practice a "sustainable forest program" and reforest their concessions, that without them illegal loggers would decimate the remaining forests, and that a logging ban does not guarantee that all logging would stop.

"Sustainable development" is a mantra that loggers have been repeating for decades. But the forests keep disappearing and the mountains keep getting bald. Where is the sustainable forestry program there? Where are the reforested areas?

The trouble with having timber concessions is that some concessionaires poach on forests outside their concessions and then claim that logs cut from there came from their concessions. It is difficult to distinguish between legal and illegal logs. But with a total logging ban, all cut logs would be illegal, all sawmills would have to be closed because there would be no logs to saw, and therefore anybody who has logs or lumber without any import papers can be arrested. Where else would he get the timber?

That should stop all logging and perhaps the remaining forests don't even have to be guarded. Because the certainty that anybody possessing timber would be caught and imprisoned and no excuse can save him will prevent people from cutting forest trees.

Finally, the wood producers claim "logging was not responsible for the floods and landslides in Aurora and Quezon." What a transparent lie. Where did all those cut logs littering the foot of the mountains, the rivers and the seas come from? Did lightning, perchance, strike all those trees so cleanly that they looked like they were cut with chainsaws?

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