In Los Baños town in Laguna province, the practice of growing ginger, corn, pepper and other crops in the upland areas of Mount Makiling has been blamed for soil erosion and flash floods during typhoons.

“Parang nagbuhuhos ng semento (Like cement being poured over),” Felino dela Torre said in describing boulders rolling downhill when Supertyphoon “Milenyo” struck four years ago.

A huge rock, the size of a cabinet, had crashed into De la Torre’s shanty and this has been so memorable to him that he has left the relic still jutting inside his home.

The Makiling forest reserve, covering 4,244 hectares of land, is under the jurisdiction of the Makiling Center for Mountain Ecosystems (MCME), a unit of the University of the Philippines Los Baños.

The center’s director, Jose Sargento, said he had ordered a field investigation into the matter.

Amelia Parchamento, another resident of Barangay Bambang at the foot of Makiling, has gotten used to evacuating every time news of a coming typhoon reaches her.

Her home clings to what was left of a concrete bridge. Portions of the bridge collapsed when Milenyo, Tropical Storm “Ondoy” and Typhoon “Pepeng” came last year, and still more when Typhoon “Basyang” hit early this month.

“How many more typhoons are we expecting to come this year?” Parchamento said.

Annual crops

Residents at the foot of Makiling believe that the flash floods are not only nature’s wrath but also brought about by human activities.

They say the mountain soil is eroded due to the “inappropriate” farming of annual crops, such as corn, pineapple, banana, pepper, and ginger. The crops are harvested seasonally and have shallow root systems that hardly hold the soil.

Trees and other perennial are suitable in slopes because they are deeply rooted to prevent erosion and flood, they say.

“After the crop harvests, the soil becomes idle. It is really forest trees that should be grown (there) instead,” Emiliano Leviste, municipal environment and natural resources officer, said in Filipino.

Santos Berces, who has tilled two hectares of rambutan and lanzones trees on Makiling for more than a decade, defended the practice of growing ginger.

“(Gingers) are rooted only to about six-inches deep. But what we do, we plant them in between the rambutan trees so they do not cause erosion,” he said in Filipino.

Domeng Obosa, president of the farmers’ group Samahan ng Magsasaka sa Paanan ng Bundok Makiling, also said planting ginger in the mountaintop should not be blamed for erosion.

“Naglalagay naman kami ng balabag gaya ng kakawate (We place buffers like madre de cacao trees to prevent erosion),” Obosa said. His group has 250 families as members.

Will power

But a source privy to the Makiling preservation, but who requested anonymity for lack of authority to speak, doubted the practice, saying such crops need full sunlight, which was why farmers prefer to grow them in open areas.

“The planting of annual crops, such as ginger, loosens the soil in Mt. Makiling, because the roots are shallow,” he said.

Moreover, these crops are seasonal in nature, thus the tendency to uproot them on a seasonal basis, too.

The source said the practice of growing annual crops was introduced to the farmers under a program of the Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Agricultural Research in 2006. This has become detrimental to the mountain, he added.

He expressed alarm that the farmers were practicing “kaingin” (slash and burn) agriculture, and firewood and charcoal making since the early 1990s, resulting in forest degradation.

“Perhaps what we need is a little political will. These farmers have no land titles, but the university could not just drive them away because they have been there and have grown crops for many years. There would also be political implications if you relocate them because they are voters (in local elections),” he said.(By Maricar Cinco, Inquirer Southern Luzon)

Source: http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/inquirerheadlines/regions/view/20100809-285716/Upland-farming-in-Makiling-poses-danger

(Edited by Joeven Calasagsag - original submission Monday, 9 August 2010, 02:21 PM)