Mt. Sto. Tomas settlers assured of no eviction

BAGUIO CITY—The Writ of Kalikasan issued by the Court of Appeals (CA) on May 6 that protects the Mt. Sto. Tomas forest reservation, does not require the eviction of the watershed’s farming residents, according to a lawyer who helped win the case for them.

More than 600 households have been paying tax declarations for lands inside Mt. Sto. Tomas, violating the provisions of the proclamation that created the forest reservation in 1940, according to records.

The writ directs the Tuba government to stop all businesses, mining activities and further settlement inside the 3,121-hectare reservation.

The CA ruling has alarmed the residents, who believe they are about to be displaced.

But lawyer Francesca Claver, counsel for the petitioners who include Lingayen-Dagupan Archbishop Socrates Villegas and Baguio Bishop Carlito Cenzon, said people “need not subscribe to the fallacious concept that protecting the ecosystem means disregarding the plight of the communities.”

The Sto. Tomas reservation straddles Baguio and Tuba, and discharges water down to Pangasinan.

Claver’s clients were residents of Baguio and San Fabian town in Pangasinan, who petitioned the Supreme Court in 2014 to protect the reserve following a Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) report that an illegal road excavation had contaminated a water source there.

Claver said the writ requires the DENR, the Tuba government, and the residents to draw up a long-term plan for the protection of the Mt. Sto. Tomas reservation.

She said, “It has been proven time and again that, given the proper education, settlers in the forest zones are the best guardians of the forest.”

The writ imposes a permanent environmental protection order over the Sto. Tomas reserve, which is composed of several mountains.

The reserve hosts two giant radar dishes for which it has been known for decades, as well as Sitio Pungayan, where a television soap opera was shot last year, drawing an unprecedented number of tourists to the area.

The writ expresses alarm over the tourist traffic ignited by the TV show “Forevermore,” as well as the proliferation of vegetable gardens and houses inside the reservation.

“Mt. Sto. Tomas has been declared a forest reserve, withdrawn from entry, sale and settlement, as early as 1940. It has never been reclassified nor any portion of it was ever reclassified as alienable and disposable, and yet, a residential community with a population of 1,815 inhabitants thrives within it,” said the writ.

The Tuba government informed the CA that it had issued 637 tax declarations covering portions of the forest reserve as far back as 1999, heeding an ordinance which granted “due course to applications for tax declarations over certain reservations in [Benguet].”

The ordinance was recalled in 2013. But it was made in effect despite a 2009 memorandum issued by the DENR, which reminded local governments “to refrain from issuing tax declarations without DENR clearance,” the CA said.

The CA observed that “vegetable gardens have proliferated (in) the area without regulation by the DENR and its subagencies, or from the local government of Tuba,” and could affect the water discharged by the mountains.

These observations have been interpreted by some Tuba government officials to mean an impending displacement of farmers. Vincent Cabreza, Inquirer Northern Luzon