Press Release
October 11, 2009

TOTAL LOG BAN TO PREVENT ECOLOGICAL DISASTER

Senate Minority Leader Aquilino Pimentel, Jr. (PDP-Laban) today challenged his colleagues in Congress to muster the resolve to approve the bill imposing a total ban on commercial logging to save what is left of the country's forests and prevent an ecological disaster more destructive than what was wrought by typhoons Ondoy and Pepeng.

Pimentel said the unabated denudation of the forest aggravated the heavy floods that submerged Metro Manila and several provinces in Luzon and triggered landslides that caused losses of lives and properties of horrifying and incomparable proportions.

He lamented that the entire nation is suffering from extreme physical dangers and economic hardship, reaping the wrath of Nature as a result of the apathy and inaction of Congress on the 25-year log ban bill that he and other lawmakers filed as early as 1988.

"The total ban on logging should have been done a long time ago because there is no question that the depredation of the forest contributed heavily to the rushing of excess water from the mountain tops to the low-lying areas," the senator from Mindanao said.

Pimentel also dared President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and Environment and Natural Resources Secretary Lito Atienza to implement a ban or moratorium on logging especially in areas where it has caused grave degradation of the environment.

He said such draconian action will disprove the impression that the government is giving lip service treatment to measures to preserve the country's dwindling forests and save the people from the harmful consequences of climate change.

"The executive branch can cancel logging permits, dismantle huge fishpens in Laguna Lake and other bodies of water that impede the flow of water into the seas. It is matter of political will really because the laws are already there," he said.

The opposition leader said that although the public sentiment is in favor of a total log ban, it will still be a tall order to have such legislation approved by Congress because of the powerful logging lobby.

"However, it would be an unforgivable offense on the part of the legislators to allow themselves to be used in advancing the interest of loggers at the expense of the welfare and survival of their constituents," Pimentel said.

He said the critical state of the country's forests is graphically illustrated not only in the heavy flashfloods during typhoon, soil erosion and landslides, siltation and drying up of rivers and other inland waterways, depletion of ground water resources and shrinking wildlife.

The forests, he stressed, badly need a respite from logging for 25 years - the length of time it takes for hardwood trees to mature and for the country to regain its lost forest cover.

Of the country's 15 million hectares of forest at the start of the 20th century, less than seven million hectares are left, including 800,000 hectares of virgin forests. About 200,000 hectares of forests are destroyed annually through legal and illegal logging and slash-and-burn farming, according to the Department of Environment and Natural Resources.

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