No welcome mat

“Unwelcome guests” is not about the “midnight appointees” Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo picked before scurrying from Malacañang—on to a hospital jail, for election sabotage raps.

Count me out, snapped the former president’s manicurist. Anita Carpon had been dangled a Pag-Ibig Fund midnight appointment. She nixed a two-year job with a P100,000 monthly paycheck.

Deal me in, said Arroyo’s former chief of staff. She named Renato Corona  chief justice just before the clock struck midnight. Today, Corona battles impeachment.

“Unwelcome guests” is, in fact, a scientific paper on forest invasive species. In Kunming, China, Filipino foresters presented this study before an Asia-Pacific conference, organized by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. “Man can cram many exotic crops in one place,” wrote N.T. Baguinon, M.O. Quimado and G.J. Francisco of UP Los Baños, Forest Management Bureau and Department of Environment and Natural Resources. But plantations are not more diverse than natural forest ecosystems, and they pose little-recognized threats.

God-endowed natural forests here are stunning in diversity. A 1911 enumeration recognized mangrove, molave and other mossy forest types. The 1984 Palawan Botanical Expedition listed forests found in various sites from karst limestone to lake margins. Ecosystem diversity classifications identified nine types: from lowland evergreen to upper montane forests.

“There could be more types… than those published,” caution Baguinon, Quimado and Francisco. “Stereotyping unique forest ecosystems into just a few lists may not render justice to complex Philippine bio-geological history.”

Malayo-Polynesian settlers, in prehistoric times, introduced exotic plants, ranging from malunggay to mango. “A few escaped into the wild like the bignai, duhat and santol. However, these have not… established themselves as persistent gregarious stands.”

Sailing on galleons from Mexico, Spanish missionaries brought plants from Central American countries. So did traders from nearby Asian countries. Among these were guyabano, chico and avocado. Coffee from Africa came via Acapulco. Some of these crept into parks: e.g.,  ipil-ipil (Leucaena leucocephala), datiles, and kamatchile.

After the Spanish-American war, more “exotics” came through exchanges and “purchase from foreign countries by private citizens.” American administrators reforested school grounds. Other exotics followed such as kakawate and teak. “African tulip has since spread deep into natural stands.”

Even before World War II, exotic trees propped up reforestation showcases, among them: Minglanilla in Cebu, Nasiping Project in Cagayan, Paraiso in Ilocos Norte, Kanlaon in Negros, and Impalutao in Bukidnon. Seedlings of bio-invasive species “found their way into national parks.”

This history cobbled a mindset, in both foresters and policymakers, “that artificial forests are as ecological as the natural forest they replace. The same ecological benefits that jungle regrowth provides can be provided by plantations,” some Filipino foresters insisted at the First Asean Congress in 1983. You can make a buck as fast in either? That fits with “most foresters’ pragmatism.” If the natural forest had been squandered, then “enrichment planting with fast-growing commercial exotic tree species is better than restoring natural forests,” Baguinon, Quimado and Francisco pointed out.

No studies have been done on the rate of bio-invasion of our nature reserves. But planting of exotics in national integrated protected areas is now banned. “No definite policies are in place yet on what to do with mature exotic trees, should they become bio-invasive.” As in the lush Makiling forest reserve?

Many logged over areas were reforested with “exotics”: mahogany, yemane or bagras. Other bio-invasive species are ihagonoy and coronitas. Ipil-ipil can usurp steep bare slopes. Along beaches, “exotic mimosoid legumes form gregarious thickets of aroma.”

Eight out of 10 seedlings raised in government nurseries are exotics: Giant ipil-ipil account for 41 percent. Large leaf mahogany—33 percent;  yemane—17 percent;  teak—4 percent. Others—5 percent. At bottom, believe it or not, are native species—17 percent.

“So, what’s wrong with our molave?” asked Dr. Franz Seidenschwarz in a January 1998 University of San Carlos  conference. “Or tindalo for that matter?” He whipped out a printout listing 1,487 sturdy native species, honed by centuries of evolution.

Reforestation programs ignore this rich genetic matrix of local species. Instead, they opt for monocultures of nine exotics, including gemelina and teak from India, mahogany from Central Africa; candlenut tree or lubang from Malaysia. “Is imported sikat?” he asked.

“Government continues to  subsidize this denigration of Philippine trees,” Sun Star noted. “This opens windows of vulnerability to disease. Valuable species are thinning. Third millennium reforestation should favor a broader genetic base, built on premium species of native trees.”

“Planting exotics violates the international convention on biodiversity,” notes the Soil and Water Conservation Foundation. “What is the consequence when students, asked to plant trees under the Greening Program, are only given exotic seedlings by the DENR? Is it because the DENR cannot, or will not, spend to gather native tree seedlings?”

Right. But public attention, alas, is fixated elsewhere: on a chief justice who volunteers his wife to run the impeachment gauntlet to save his skin. “Greater love than this no man hath….”

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