Introduction

The health of the Benguet vegetable economy in the 1950s and 1960s masked an underlying environmental deterioration. Soil erosion and exhaustion, water-table depletion, deforestation, and pesticide contamination threatened the sustainability of commercial agriculture from the beginning. During periods of prosperity such problems were not apparent, as nutrient subsidies and imported substitutes allowed continued expansion. But when the vegetable industry suffered a partial collapse in the mid-1970s, environmental degradation began to form an economic constraint. Unable to obtain adequate supplies of commercial fertilizers, farmers could not easily coax crops from the depleted soils. Furthermore, the economic trauma deepened the ecological wound; when the price of petroleum-based fuels suddenly exceeded the means of most farmers, deforestation accelerated.

The Benguet farmers have not, however, merely allowed themselves to be buffeted by adverse economic winds, nor have they succumbed to environmental calamities. Rather, they have responded with a series of innovations, permitting them to continue farming, and, in some instances, to prosper. In the language of human ecology, they have adapted to their precarious condition through continual readaptation, based on opportunistic responses to ever-changing circumstances. But their very solutions have sometimes made matters worse. A few well-off growers, for example, have derived great profits in clearing the high-elevation eastern oak forests, but in so doing they have diminished the water supplies of many lower and older farm districts.

Environmental deterioration puts Benguet farmers in a wrenching bind. To survive they must jeopardize their futures. And with the national economy unable to absorb many rural migrants—at a

time when local population is mounting rapidly—human pressure on the land lies heavier every year. And the growing ecological debacle should not be considered in human terms only. As chemically intensive agriculture expands, natural areas are diminishing and a number of species face extinction.

If one were to seek culprits, both wealthy agriculturalists and certain powerful government officials would have to be named. Large-scale farmers, both Chinese and Igorot, have financed the poorly graded roads and the wastefully bulldozed gardens in the cloud-forest highlands, while military and other high officials have underwritten the illegal clearing of the diminishing pine stands. But to lay all blame at the feet of these individuals would be to obfuscate larger social and economic processes. Almost all local residents approve highly of road and farm development in the cloud forest and they have consistently encouraged it. Most consider the responsible entrepreneurs as the progresso benefactors of the larger community. The denudation of the pine lands is also problematic; Cordilleran residents need fuel and construction lumber, and the profits made here help support a segment of the community.

The conjunction of economic movements and environmental effects presents a seemingly inescapable bind, a tragedy as classically defined. This becomes evident in studying government policy, where actions designed to abet the vegetable industry consistently exacerbate land degradation, while those formulated to protect the environment deepen the farmers' economic plight. As a result, official policies have been ineffectual at best, and occasionally calamitous.

Despite this gloomy prognosis, I am not ready to conclude that the Benguet farm economy is doomed. Nature is surprisingly forgiving; wildlife may be exterminated, but gardening will likely struggle along as farmers devise solutions to each new ecological impasse. And a more fundamental release, based on a complete agroecological reorientation, is not unimaginable. Some farmers are now experimentally cultivating tree crops in hopes that they might support a more economically secure and environmentally benign agriculture for the future. The success of this project, however, depends as much on the well-being of the Philippine economy as on the health of the trees; at present it is hard to say which looks more vulnerable.