Answer:
The Philippines
Dennis P. Garrity, David M. Kummer, and Ernesto S. Guiang
This profile focuses on the most pressing issues of sustainable natural resource management in the sloping upland areas of the Philippines. It begins with an analysis of the historical and current dimensions of land use in the upland ecosystem, reviews and critiques proposed actions, and recommends solutions within an overarching strategy that builds on the linkages that exist between farming and forestry systems.
The upland ecosystem must be addressed as a distinct entity. The uplands are rolling to steep areas where both agriculture and forestry are practiced on slopes ranging upward from 18 percent. The sloping uplands occupy about 55 percent of the land surface of the country (Cruz et al., 1986) and have an estimated population of 17.8 million. The upland population is projected to be 24 million to 26 million in the year 2000, with a density of 160 to 175 persons per km2. Upland inhabitants are primarily poor farming families with insecure land tenure. Subsistence food production rather than forestry is their over-
Dennis P. Garrity is an agronomist/crop ecologist with the International Rice Research Institute, Los Baños, Philippines; David M. Kummer is a visiting assistant professor with the Graduate School of Geography, and a research associate with the George Perkins Marsh Institute, Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts; Ernesto S. Guiang is a community forest management specialist with the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, Quezon City, Philippines.
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Suggested Citation:"The Philippines." National Research Council. 1993. Sustainable Agriculture and the Environment in the Humid Tropics. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/1985.
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riding priority. The paramount objective for public intervention in upland management is that of obtaining the greatest good for the greatest number of people in ways that are consistent with the long-term sustainability of the productive capacity of the ecosystem.
Forest denudation is at an advanced stage in the Philippines. Total forest cover shrank from 10.5 million ha in 1968 to 6.1 million ha in 1991. The remaining old-growth forest covered less than 1 million ha in 1991 and possibly as little as 700,000 ha. At current rates of logging, nearly all vestiges of the country's primary dipterocarp forest biota may be depleted in the next 10 to 15 years. The will of the people and government to effectively address the Philippine deforestation problem is growing, but it is still weak.
There have been several recent reviews concerning natural resource management in the Philippines. These reviews examined government policy, the political climate, and the institutional framework and made numerous specific recommendations for a major reorientation. In addition, the Master Plan for Forestry Development (Department of Environment and Natural Resources, 1990) has recently been issued by the Philippine government. It lays out a framework for forestland management over the next 25 years. It sets a detailed, optimistic agenda that adopts a strategy of reduced public management in favor of increased private management of forest resources through people-oriented forestry.
Although this profile focuses on the dynamics of upland agricultural technology in relation to deforestation, many factors other than agricultural technology have a stronger direct influence on the rate and extent of forest depletion or conversion. These factors include inappropriate forest policy, poor policy implementation, and the insecurity of land tenure among upland farm populations. Commercial logging (legal and illegal) directly caused the majority of old-growth forest depletion during the past half century, and it continues to do so today. The accessibility to remote forestlands brought about by the opening of logging roads stimulated the settlement of small-scale farmers and resulted in the subsequent conversion of depleted forests to farms.
The initial sections of this profile examine the present state of the natural resource base of the uplands and past trends in resource degradation. The profile then reviews the importance of land and forest resources to the political economy of the Philippines and the failure of development in the Philippines in the post-World War II period. This is followed by an analysis of potential solutions to the problems identified. The solutions to the upland resource management and subsistence crises fall into a general strategy with three essential com-
