By Atty. Antonio P. Pekas
The first time I saw the Southern Tagalog areas was in 1967. The mountains all around were green with coconut trees dominating the landscape. We were on our way to Lucena City, Quezon province to attend the graduation of my sister from nursing school.
About 5 years after that, I went back to the area to enter the UP College of Forestry in Los Banos, Laguna. It was shocking to enter the wide American style campus, put up during the American time. More shocking was when we entered the College of Forestry campus after traversing the College of Agriculture, a distance of about two kilometers, for it was fittingly in a forest, the Mt. Makiling forest.
Over the years I had been going back there for one reason or another. In 1980, I attended a seminar in the nearby town, on a hilly part overlooking Laguna de Bay. As always, I was impressed with the forest cover of the mountains all around. But not just ordinary forests at the venue of the seminar. These were agro-forests. They were dominated by fruit trees. At the topmost layer were coconut trees and other tall fruit trees, then there was a second layer composed of shorter trees like lanzones, rambutan or coffee. Then the third layer of either pineapples, camote, cassava, etc. You could literally see the money falling from those trees.
I inquired how much a hectare of such land with such trees and plants and the answer was about two million pesos. That was in the early 80s. Such land might cost more than 10 times now, or 20 to 30 million pesos or more.
So every time I meet somebody from the Southern Tagalog areas, my first reaction is, “You are rich.”
A few years after that, I went with my friends to an area near Sta. Ines, Rizal for a three day adventure. It was on the other side of Rizal province. You had to cross Metro Manila from Laguna to get there. The mountain we had to traverse were bald. They were cogonal areas, deforested long ago. To go through the rough and muddy roads there was “buwis buhay”, as somebody in youtube described it. In Ilocano, “salda biag.” An ordinary 4X4 vehicle could not go through those roads. It had to be specially fitted with chains on the tires, and a good winch to pull the vehicle if it was at all possible, depending on the situation. That would even be iffy on such muddy steep terrain.
There was a gold rush in Sta. Ines during that time which caused so many Igorots to try their luck there with their supposed expertise in gold panning or small scale mining. Many got lucky, but a lot also got their shirts or their roofs burned.
We did not reach the epicenter of the gold rush but the people in the nearby villages, when they came to know that I was (and still am, he he) an Igorot, said, “Malalaki ang mga bahay ng mga kababayan mo doon sa bayan. Kumikita sila.”
The water from those bald mountains would flow to the lower areas of Rizal, including Marikina.
After I became a lawyer, I cut my legal teeth in a bus company so I ended up having bus companies as clients when I was still based in Metro Manila. Handling their cases meant “criss-crossing” the provinces of Cagayan and Isabela. Traveling there from Manila you would be shocked after you pass Nueva Vizcaya. The mountains were really bald, as far as the eye could see. Even more so, now. That is, millions more trees were illegally cut.
To illustrate, I once met somebody who tried his luck in illegal logging there about half a century ago. He and his business partner just bought a 4X4 truck for carrying narra logs. They presented it to the lumber yard which will be their buyer of the logs. They thought their newly refurbished truck would gain some admiration but it got laughed at instead.
They were told that they would have to go far, deep into the forests, through high peaks, on really rough and muddy roads. So the truck needed some specialized add-ons to be able to take the punishment. One was to prevent the brakes from burning when going down a very steep mountainous stretch with a very heavy load that would mean practically riding on the brakes. A continuous spray of water on the brakes had to be installed with water pumps and tanks on the truck.
Then when going up such long steep terrain with tons and tons of logs, the topmost cylinders of the engine might get starved with oil. So a special oil pump and reservoir must be installed to prevent that from happening. Or to avoid the engine from frying itself.
That was how bad illegal logging was in the Cagayan Valley, since time immemorial. Anybody who had a capable truck could join the game.
So theee were the recent causes of the tragic floods in Cagayan and Isabela, and in Marikina and the nearby Rizal towns.
The solution might be found on the lush mountains of the Southern Tagalog areas—agro-forestry. But that would be another long story.**
