CORDILLERA'S FORESTS AND WATERSHEDS

The Cordillera is dubbed as the watershed cradle of Northern Luzon. Its forests sustain six of Northern Luzon's major river systems. Perhaps because of this, government classifies 85% of the region as forestland. Of this, 30% is officially designated as forest reserve. The classification of forests as watershed reservations has largely been associated with hydropower and irrigation dam projects.

Long before any dam project was undertaken in the Cordillera, the Central Cordillera Forest Reservation was already created in 1929 by the US colonial government, who set aside 74,631 hectares for the purpose. Mt. Data National Park, covering 5,512 hectares, is part of this reservation. To ensure the viability of existing and prospective dams, the Marcos government later created several watershed reservations.

All forest reservations in the Cordillera are now in a critical state. Mt. Data National Park, for example, has more than 71 percent of its area logged over and converted to agricultural, residential, and commercial use. In earlier years, several mining companies including Benguet Corporation and Lepanto have held logging concessions to supply their mine timber.

In the late 1970's, there was a shift from logging of pine timber for the mines to the logging of hardwood for export to Japan. Some 200,000 hectares of old-growth dipterocarp rainforest in the provinces of Apayao, Kalinga and Mt. Province then became the target area for big logging concessions. Today, only less than half of these forests have remained relatively untouched. Yet the government has continued to issue licenses to hardwood loggers.

Massive deforestation by large-scale logging operations has dwindled the Cordillera's forest cover to less than 47%. The reforestation program of the government has proven ineffective. The occurrence of flashfloods in areas downstream of major rivers, such as areas in Pangasinan drained by the Agno River, has become a perennial problem.

Erosion from balding mountainsides along the entire length of the Agno river basin has so severely silted up the reservoirs of the Ambuclao and Binga dams that these can no longer hold very much water. Their floodgates thus have to be opened whenever there is heavy rainfall. #