Development Plans: Social and Agroforestry
Benguet foresters despair over current forest trends. Their daunting challenge is to design programs that at once protect watersheds, ensure timber availability, and yet do not interfere with the Benguet farmers' livelihoods. With this in mind, officials of the Bureau of Forest Development have attempted to foster local participation in arboriculture.
Several Cordilleran scholars have excoriated the very notion of "social forestry," claiming that it represents yet another attempt by outsiders (or by capital, more generally) to gain control of local re-
sources (see Parpan-Pagusara 1984:59). While this may well be true for some projects, the recent plans implemented by the BFD office in Abatan and forwarded by the scholars at Baguio's Forestry Research Institute (FORI) seem neither so ambitious nor so threatening.
For many years forestry officials have touted the Japanese alder (Alnus japonica ), a fast-growing species that both protects slopes and fixes nitrogen. At various times they have distributed free seedlings, which school children were required to plant in the early 1970s. Yet the program has enjoyed only marginal success. As of 1986, seedlings were scarce, and since alders do not regenerate spontaneously here, they are at best maintaining their position. Another social forestry program of the 1960s encouraged farmers to plant pine seedlings around their gardens, but this could not help but fail. Pines shade crops and extract nutrients, while, at the time, the mere presence of trees could jeopardize a land claim. This is the kind of project rightly denounced by Baguio activists, but such approaches have by now been largely abandoned.[1]
More recently, development agents have begun promoting fruit crops. Orchards would not replenish wood supplies, but they could protect watersheds, minimize erosion, and provide an alternative income should the vegetable industry again falter. In 1976, Benguet planners unfortunately gave top priority to coffee and mango culture (Baguio Midland Courier March 28, 1976). Although coffee is an old Cordilleran crop, disease and market fluctuations have kept it from fulfilling its early promise, and mangoes thrive only on the lowest slopes, where they are still out-competed in the market by the lowland groves.
Temperate fruit offers another possibility. Although winters are not cold enough for true dormancy, Bauko municipality in Mountain Province is able to produce meager crops of both apples and pears, and a team of development workers has suggested temperate fruit culture in the Lo-o basin as well (Duhaylungsod n.d.; Dar 1985). Citrus is another option; several farmers near Baguio have derived excellent returns from small plantings of improved orange and lemon varieties, and one Buguias resident is now nurturing a small orchard. Viral diseases, endemic in indigenous trees, pose a threat, but a joint Philippine and German development program now provides resistant root stocks and advises participants in control methods.
Even if diseases could be eradicated, most Buguias farmers would probably resist fruit growing. The single annual harvest would translate into fewer jackpot opportunities, and growers find the prospect of waiting several years before the first harvest as disconcerting. New orchards also require substantial amounts of capital, and Buguias farmers fear predatory children would deprive them of the long-awaited harvest. Nevertheless, the one citrus grower persists in seeing tree crops as Buguias's hope, a possible substitute for the imperiled vegetable industry. That the community at large could be persuaded to make such a drastic change cannot be ruled out. It would not be the first time the Buguias people had completely reoriented their production system.