somewhere DEEP in the HINTERLANDS
@lendmeyourears (40)
Philippines
April 3, 2007 8:15am CST
This is the sight of a very remote area in Mindanao, Philippines. I took this picture during my internship as a Communications student. As you may have observed, the surrounding mountains are still very healthy and virgin. This particular area is one of the very few government-protected areas because of its high vegetation and role in the surrounding tribes. Unfortunately here in the Philippines, and perhaps true to some countries, we are rapidly losing these type of areas due mainly to high-volume logging.
Again we are reminded of their importance only after occurence of flashfloods and other calamities related to the destruction of forests and wild habitats.
What your thought on this people?? Do we share the same worries or are there other stuffs bothering you now??
1 response
@ryanphil01 (4182)
• Philippines
3 Apr 07
i shall be more factual in disccusing the issue you raised up here. based from the report of the International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO)last May, 2006, despite of the slowing down of deforestation rates in the Philippines in the last three decades, most of the country's forests are still at risk with only around 1.6 percent being managed in a sustainable way. ITTO said that recent community--based approaches to forest management in the Philippines have yet to succeed "in restoring the country's degraded landscapes.
The report of ITTO, known as, "Status of Tropical Forest Management of 2005" says that of the estimated 4.7 million hectares of production forests -forest lands that are used for the production of timber and other forest products - only around 76,000 hectares are sustainably managed.
Thr report notes that the control of illegal activites - such as continued logging in areas of old-growth areas "remains a major challenge and is one of the obstacles to sustainable forest management.
In general, the report says that 95% of the world's forests are unprotected. Special mention was our country as among those that have lost large areas of their forest cover over the last 6o years.
No other Asia-Pacific was deforested as extensively as the Philippinesin the period after World War II. Many of the causes of this "large-scale destruction" of our forest resource" can be linked to a combination of land concession tenure issues and the lack of ability or will to enforce the conditions of the concessions.
One of the good laws which should have been approved but was not endorsed by the senate was the RA 8371, authored by Sen. Flavier, called the Indigenous People's Right Act (IPRA) which focuses on the "delineation of ancentral domains and parcellary survey of ancenstral lands." This law would have helped to protect the natives from giant logging companies, because the IPRA recognizes the ownership of the natives of their ancenstral lands even without land titles. But what happened to this law? Ask the senators...who opposed this law?
