Nothing wrong with Enrile’s logging concessions

The tone of Juan Mercado’s July 5 column (“Silenced songbirds”)—and I quote, “By happenstance, Sen. Juan Ponce Enrile’s San Jose Timber Corp. logs this last patch of natural forest”—fed Inquirer readers the wrong idea that there’s something wrong with San Jose’s operations in Samar.

Just to set the record straight, Senator Enrile has, through the years, been openly challenging anyone who feels that San Jose’s operations are illegal to file charges in court. But not a single case has been filed against San Jose from the Cory administration to the present.

Enrile has been holding the logging concession for 30 years now and he has dutifully included it in his statement of assets and liabilities. In fact, Enrile could go to court to seek damages because the Department of Environment and Natural Resources lifted, only in 2005, a logging moratorium imposed in the area. That moratorium should have expired in 1989.

The moratorium was effected only to allow government to conduct an environmental assessment of the area for a few months, but those few months got extended to 16 years without any valid justification because the study found no reason to suspend logging in the area.

The DENR has ruled that Enrile’s firm had a right to harvest timber because a huge part of the area covered by the timber licensing agreement consisted of plantations that belonged to SJTC.

But legalities aside, San Jose cannot be blamed if some patches had formed in its concession area during the moratorium period that lasted a decade and a half because with San Jose not there to maintain the property, many people stole logs from the forest.

—EDITH CALDERON,

Ipil, Gonzaga, Cagayan