Halting the Plunder

This article is excerpted from Plundering Paradise: The Struggle for the Environment in the Philippines, by Robin Broad with John Cavanagh, University of California Press, April 1993.

Life is never easy for a Filipino peasant; but, decades ago, here in San Fernando, an old man tells us, "Food was plentiful. There was plenty of fish, plenty of corn, and plenty of rice."

Then, we are told, problems began to appear.

We are resting at a cluster of houses. It is late in the day and the peasants are returning home from their fields. A young mother, perhaps in her 20s, and an elderly couple do most of the talking.

For years, the younger woman explains, "ever since we started seeing big logging trucks" pass through San Fernando, the peasants watched the rivers change shape, turn muddier, less deep, yet more violent during the big rains. In formerly flood-free areas, the river would now overflow its banks, inundating adjacent fields with mud from the increasingly barren hills around them. And, the old man interjects, the river would sometimes even swallow the edges of the fertile fields along its side. In the last five years, one peasant who cultivated land on the banks of the Tigua lost nearly half of the land he had farmed.

There were other changes, too. Creeks nourished by once-forested watersheds disappeared during the dry season; landslides became common during the rainy season. And the rat population, which had previously found food in the forests and had been kept in check by forest predators, now ravaged farmers' fields at night. "People are hungry because the rats are eating everything," continues the young woman solemnly. Today, more than four out of five children suffer from some degree of malnutrition.

The problems, the people say they came intuitively to understand, could be summed up in one word: trees. The forests that had still been lush in the 1970s were disappearing by the 1980s. Mindanao's riches not only had attracted poor settlers; they also had lured agricultural plantations (Del Monte and Dole, for example), miners -- and loggers.

In 1987, at the people's request, the Redemptorists, an order of Philippine missionaries who were based in San Fernando at the time, led ecology workshops to help put the people's observations in a larger context. "Actually," admits Redemptorist brother Karl Gaspar, "we were not experts in ecology; we were not planning to have studies or meetings about ecology. But that was the issue the people were most interested in."

The 1987 discussions about the trees had begun in an atmosphere of hope. Corazon Aquino had recently come to power, and though Manila politics often seem too far away from the day-to-day reality of Mindanao to have much relevance here, the residents of San Fernando thought the change of government would make a difference. If the authoritarian government of Ferdinand Marcos had given way to the people-powered Aquino, certainly the new government would listen to what San Fernando people-power had to say.

So they decided to do what you do in a feudal society: You ask your patron for help. The farmers wrote to President Aquino asking that logging be stopped in the area.

After months with no reply, the petitioners came to the painful realization that they might never receive an answer. After much thought, they concluded that they had waited long enough. People power, they agreed, meant action. One day in July of 1987, they held a Mass. And then they acted. In the middle of the single dirt road passing from the hills through San Fernando's town proper, several hundred of them sat down. They positioned themselves in front of the municipal hall. They sat behind a hand-lettered sign announcing to the logging trucks, "Loggers Stop: We Are on Picket." They called the sign a roadblock, and they referred to themselves as "the picketers."

Among them were the San Fernando residents with whom we are talking, including the young mother, then seven months pregnant. "We were very tense at first," she confesses. "We thought they would drive a truck through us ... or someone would throw a grenade at us. But then, much to our surprise, the trucks stopped."

So began the first of many "citizens' arrests" of logging trucks descending from the mountains, the arresters claiming they were simply exercising their constitutional rights. For 11 days and nights, in staggered shifts of about 50 per day (so they could tend their fields), they slept, ate, and held Mass on that road -- until there stood 13 fully loaded (or, more accurately, overloaded) 10-ton-capacity trucks coming down from the mountains on one side of the makeshift blockade. On the other side were 18 empty trucks trying to climb back up the mountains for the next load.

Then, on the 12th day, a military detachment appeared. The picketers "held Mass ... and sang the national anthem. There were 35-40 soldiers and 80-90 people. The people were crying, but wouldn't move," recollects Father Pat Kelly, a Canadian missionary in San Fernando who offered his support to the picketers. One of the leaders recalls for us what happened next: "We locked arms and blocked the road ... They used rattan sticks and rattan shields and 24 of us were so badly beaten we had big welts afterwards."

The attack seems only to have convinced the people of the importance of their actions.

And then the picketers decided to act again. This time, they decided, Manila would be the venue. Thirteen of them were chosen for the third stage of San Fernando people power, seven women and six men, ranging from a 53-year-old mother of 11 to a 19-year-old student. For almost all, it was their first trip to the big city, their first time to leave Mindanao; for some, it was their first trip outside Bukidnon province.

In Manila's stifling tropical heat, the 13 began what they called their "fast for trees." Living in tents and hastily constructed sheds just outside the main office of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, they drank only sparing amounts of milk and honey. They vowed to break their fast only if the government met all their demands. Among other requests, they asked the government to declare a total logging ban for all of Bukidnon and to provide money to train and employ forest guards.

"The picketers were so impressive," says one observer. "They held a press conference and one by one they stood before microphones and cameras to introduce themselves and their mission." Wearing papier-mache masks depicting people in agony, the fasters explained that logging had led to increased hunger in Bukidnon: "We fast in union with those who are forced to fast because of destitution."

Ten days after the fast began, very early in the morning, the fasters went to the presidential palace to meet with Aquino. When President Aquino arrived, six of the Bukidnon 13 spoke in turn. They spoke respectfully but forthrightly, complaining that some local officials and military were either protecting illegal loggers or involved in the activity themselves. In a feudal society like the Philippines, for a poor peasant to say such things to a rich city person, let alone to the country's president, is a difficult task -- but they did it. When they had finished, President Aquino spoke, voicing her support of the agreement they had signed.

AS WE HIKE THROUGH the corn fields and rice paddies of San Fernando and listen to the wisdom of its farmers, we begin to grasp several lessons that their experience offers to the environmental movement globally.

One is a lesson about poor people and the environment. Individually, poor people are under enormous economic pressure to exploit natural resources (albeit on a small scale) in order to survive in the short term. Yet, when working together, the poor themselves are likely to become not only the catalysts for halting the plunder but also the initiators of sustainable alternatives.

The people of San Fernando also defy a position at times advanced by poorer-country governments: that protection of forests and other natural resources is a concern being forced upon them by rich-country governments and environmentalists -- and that it will keep them from developing.

The actions of the peasants of San Fernando demonstrate that the environment may or may not be their government's concern; it may or may not be a concern of richer governments and groups; but it is their own concern. For them, there is no trade-off between genuine development and environmental sustainability. Rather, genuine development cannot be rooted in plunder; it must be based on community management of those natural resources upon which they depend for their existence.

Robin Broad was a professor in the School of International Service at the American University in Washington, D.C. when this article appeared. John Cavanagh was co-director of the World Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C.