Invisible price tags

Jockeying by presidential aspirants, like Jejomar and Mar, cram headlines. So do Senators “Sexy, Pogi and Tanda” on their way to jail, as many speculate. These stories blur gut issues that will determine whether our grandchildren will inherit a livable country.

The little noticed collapse of soil is one such threat.

It takes nature 100 years to form a centimeter of topsoil. That thin layer is what separates us from starvation or food on our table. Yet, an hour’s downpour on deforested land will flush this resource into the sea. 

In Mindanao, 299 million metric tons of topsoil are swept away yearly, the late Edmundo Prantilla of the Mindanao Center for Policy Studies estimated. Nationwide, erosion for upland agricultural land can cost P6.39 billion, wrote Herminia Francisco and Maria de los Angeles in their study for UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

Soil nutrients, lost in upland erosion represents 4.2 percent of the gross value added in agriculture. That chews up one percent of everything the country earned as reflected in “net national product."  Francisco and de los Angeles add: This sum could have been “can reasonably be spent by the government for soil conservation programs in upland agricultural areas...” 

Politicians set precise kickback tags for their pork barrel. Three senators, for example, pocketed P581 million, say the pending charges before the Ombudsman.  Can quantify a loss which spans generations? 

Muddy stains today discolor the seas where major rivers exit, as in Lingayen Bay or Davao Gulf. These are saline graveyards for irreplaceable topsoil that belonged to our grandchildren—which we squandered.

Stump-studded land provide stark images of deforestation in a country that has less than a quarter of its forests left. In 1595, trees blanketed 27.5 million hectares. But a logging mafia wrecked that “heirloom.” Their log exports topped 11.1 million cubic meters in 1974, making the Philippines one of the world’s prima donnas of timber trade. Exports plummeted to puny 841,000 cubic meters a decade later. The forests still have to recover. The country now imports wood.

Land degradation is lethal because it is often barely-visible. The first hard to detect symptoms appear in heavily logged over areas. Plants fail to regenerate. Tree crown covers fall. Wildlife and other plant life rapidly disappear as soil collapses. 

“Reversing soil erosion makes fighting insurgency seem like child play,” the late national scientist Dioscoro Umali once wrote. He warned that degradation damages piles up unnoticed. This delays corrective measures, accelerating   further deterioration. Yet, when tallied, loss can exceed by 10 times the bill from deforestation.

Who of our “leaders” bothered to figure out this invisible price tags?  That would help us sense the hidden patterns of change.

“All too often, we register the dramatic flare-ups,” editor Thoe Sommers once noted. “Yet, the geological changes without underfoot often escape our notice. We reveal in linear extrapolations of existing trends. But we are inclined to forget that every trend begets its own counter trend, every vision its revision.”

This “hidden pattern” runs through our Ifugao rice. “Their incredible (beauty) is neither mummified nor marbleized,” marveled sociologist Gelia T. Castillo. The terraces “are a living heritage that must be planted to rice every year. [Otherwise] there will be neither rice nor terraces.”

Tourism officials back terrace festivals. Less obvious is the fact that the terraces have lost half of their farmers. Almost 80 percent of them can no longer harvest enough rice to feed their families. On the average, the rice produced lasts only 5.1 months.

A Wageningen University study reveals that only 60-155 communal irrigation systems are operating. Surrounding forest and grasslands are depleted. “Incursion of modern political systems weakened traditional communal activities.”

“This (is) exactly what the children are doing with corresponding consequences on the sustainability of the rice terraces,” Castillo writes. “It is no surprise that young ones, particularly those who have gone to school, migrate to other provinces such as Isabela, Quirino, Nueva Vizcaya, Pangasinan and Baguio City.”

All these have not upset minds mired in long vanished abundance. ”There’s more where it came from,” officials shrug.

Can our vision be broader? With our scientists   and academics, can we not figure out these invisible price tags—if not out of altruism, then out of the extortionate cost of a devastated environment.

In this book “The Governance of ecology”, former Environment Secretary Victor Ramos writes:  “Local governments are in the best position to create the most environmentally informed communities.” He pinpoints features that make for effective ecological governance in a country an often paralyzed by personality politics.

Resolving the common crisis “in our environmental present and future,” Ramos says, is not only for the strong but the creative. All should contribute in settling those invisible price tags. After all, they too have grandchildren.