MANILA, Philippines—The logs that cascaded down with the flashfloods that swept through Iligan City and left a wide swath of destruction would be milled to build the homes of the survivors of Tropical Storm Sendong, officials said Friday.
President Benigno Aquino has ordered Environment Secretary Ramon Paje to confiscate the estimated 5,000 cubic meters of logs and turn them over to Social Welfare Secretary Corazon Soliman for the housing needs of tens of thousands of Sendong victims.
“The President’s instruction is to use these logs to build the homes of those who had lost their abode,” Paje, who ordered their confiscation Thursday, said in an interview by phone.
According to Paje, if 65 percent of the logs would be processed into lumber, this would be roughly equivalent to 1.37 million board feet. A 10-wheel truck can load 10,000 board feet of lumber.
He couldn’t say how many families could benefit from this. Social welfare officials have been listing down the names of tens of thousands of people cooped up in evacuation centers for emergency housing assistance.
“We’re going to use the list as basis for shelter and emergency shelter assistance,’’ Soliman said.
The logs were believed to have originated from the Kapai River in Lanao del Sur and carried downstream by the Iligan River as heavy rains lashed Mindanao and parts of Visayas late last week.
Lanao del Sur is part of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, which has its own environment department and did not enforce the President’s Executive Order No. 23 imposing a moratorium on logging effective last February, according to Paje.
On Mr. Aquino’s instruction, newly designated ARMM Governor Mujiv Hataman ordered a total log ban in the region this week.
“That was the problem. When the President declared a total log ban, they were not sold to the idea. So logging in ARMM was allowed, and above that, there was illegal logging,” Paje said in a telephone interview.
While the past ARMM officials ignored the moratorium, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources seized logs that were transported outside of the autonomous region, and at one point ended up being charged in court, Paje said.
He said it was Hataman’s call to take to task the logging concessionaires, or illegal loggers inside ARMM.
Out of its P1.3 billion budget for the National Greening Program in 2011, the DENR released P30 million to ARMM for its own greening program, Paje said.
“Since we’re supporting them, we’re demanding that they comply with the national government directive,’’ he said. “They have their own DENR secretary. We will respect them. We’re only asking them to cooperate.”
The government is targeting to reforest 1.5 million hectares of protected and open areas by 2016. In 2011, it reforested 78,000 hectares, more than double the 32,000 hectares in 2010.