DAGUPAN CITY—The government’s ill-equipped, understaffed forest protectors are suffering the consequences of their cat-and-mouse game with illegal loggers in the mountains separating Mangatarem town in Pangasinan and Sta. Cruz town in Zambales.
On April 30, a team of foresters and Army soldiers led by Raymundo Gayo, community environment and natural resources officer, drove up those mountains in the dead of night to pursue suspected illegal loggers.
“It was late afternoon that day when we received a text message. According to our informant, there were 27 people with chainsaws in the group and a bulldozer,” Gayo said.
“But fortunately or unfortunately, we did not find the group after four hours of searching,” he said.
Gayo discovered the following day that the loggers had the means and equipment to open a new road into the forest, right under their noses.
Building their own roads has become the tactic taken by illegal loggers to evade a military checkpoint in Barangay Muelang in Mangatarem, where a 19.5-kilometer stretch of the 54-km Mangatarem-Sta. Cruz Road is located, Gayo said.
The loggers’ new roads branch out into three tributary roads, including an old logging road that illegal operators repaired. All the small routes connect to a main road atop the mountains.
“I think they wanted to penetrate a vegetated area that remains untouched in that part of the mountain [within the Pangasinan territory],” Gayo said.
According to the website of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) Forest Management Bureau, the virgin forest cover adjoining Pangasinan and Zambales is about 21,520 hectares. About 25 percent (5,260 ha) is in Mangatarem, while 16,260 ha lies within Sta. Cruz.
Gayo said the illegal loggers’ target constitutes about 40 percent of the virgin forest in Mangatarem, which survived the onslaught of illegal logging since 2009.
Massive illegal logging took place in the Mangatarem forest when a team of environment officials from Central Luzon and the Ilocos inspected the area in March.
Samuel Peñafiel, DENR Ilocos director, said the team discovered several spur roads that lead deep into the forest.
Leduina Co, Pangasinan provincial environment and natural resources officer, said trees were cut there in 2009 when the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) began building the Mangatarem-Sta. Cruz Road.
“We are inclined to believe that the road was constructed for illegal loggers to have access to the forest. What’s the logic in bulldozing the middle of the mountains where there is a very thick dipterocarp (hardwood) vegetation? So, the intention was really to cut trees there,” Co said.
DPWH earlier denied it accommodated illegal loggers when it built the road.
News of the illegal cutting of trees has enraged Gov. Amado Espino Jr., who directed police to crack down on the illegal loggers.
In Lanao del Norte, soldiers on Monday seized 329 pieces of logs in Barangay Ilian in Sultan Nasga Dimaporo town. Lt. Col. Ferdinand Razalan, head of the Army’s 35th Infantry Battalion, described the seizure as the biggest haul by his men this year.
A campaign against illegal logging in the forested areas of Lanao del Norte was revived following the December floods that killed hundreds of people in Iligan City.
Most of the victims were crushed by logs unleashed by floodwaters from the hinterlands of Lanao del Norte and Lanao del Sur.
Razalan said DENR estimated the value of the seized logs at more than P700,000. Recently, soldiers also seized more than 3,000 board feet of logs in the watershed of Tubod town.
The seized logs were stored at the 35th IB headquarters in Salvador town pending a DENR decision on how these would be disposed of. With a report from Richel Umel, Inquirer Mindanao