Biocides, Human Health, and Faunal Destruction

The biocides continually sprayed on the Buguias landscape have poisoned many farmers as well as entire aquatic ecosystems. Farmers occasionally use officially banned poisons (Medina n.d.); many more overapply legal pesticides and dispose of the residues improperly. In earlier years, growers often washed their backpack sprayers directly in streams, even those providing drinking water. Local ordinances now prohibit this practice, and barangay officials continually warn of pesticide hazards. Buguias residents will not even eat their own cabbage grown in the dry season because they know it is highly contaminated. Few warnings are forthcoming, however, from company agents, the individuals who provide most new information on chemical-intensive agriculture.

Few Buguias streams have potable water, owing both to chemical residues and to amoebic and bacterial pathogens. In the center of town, several spring-fed domestic water systems were installed shortly after the war using the steel pipes supplied as war reparations by the Japanese government. These frequently clogged pipes spew rusty water, but more worrisome are the contaminants entering the spring-boxes in runoff from adjacent fields. In the dry season, desperate farmers often tap the community's drinking water supplies to irrigate their gardens; when the domestic systems are reconnected, the water runs brown for several hours. Barangay officials have battled to maintain and even to improve local drinking water, but funds are limited, and farmers upslope are reluctant to jeopardize their own livelihoods for the benefit of those living in the center of the community.

The effects of pesticide and fertilizer ingestion, derived from field exposure and from eating and drinking, are impossible to evaluate without a medical study. But indirect evidence suggests adverse impacts on human health. Virtually all Buguias residents argue with conviction that people die younger today than they did before the war, despite the much-improved postwar diet. Although this probably results from age-related memory distortion (old people seem much older than they are to children), the community's intellectuals, persons of critical and discerning bent, agree that average longevity may have declined. (A few elders, however, actually

blame the supposed life-span shortening on the varied postwar diet: people today are no longer "preserved by sweet-potato vinegar.") A more plausible culprit would be agricultural chemicals. But regardless of actual mortality trends, acute pesticide poisoning is not an uncommon diagnosis in local clinics.

Pesticides, fertilizers, and silt have destroyed most of the aquatic life that once spiced the local diet. Eels have been virtually extirpated, and other species are now rare. In Lo-o, the surviving river life is simply too contaminated to be edible (Figoy n.d.). In Buguias, sculpins, tadpoles, and water bugs are still avidly consumed, although almost exclusively by the young men who value highly such pulutan (rich snacks that complement gin).

But agricultural chemicals are not the sole cause of faunal destruction. Many land animals have been locally exterminated through habitat destruction and overhunting. In Buguias, the only remaining "game" mammal is the rat, although a few civets may still dwell in the thickets along Toking Creek. Deer survive only in the steep pinelands between Natubleng and the Agno, and although wild hogs still roam the cloud forest of eastern Buguias municipality, they are now rarely seen. Humans long ago drove monkeys out of the Agno Valley, and they now seem to be doing the same in western Ifugao. Snipes, herons, and wild chickens, formerly abundant in Buguias, are gone, victims of overhunting, rice-field conversion, and garden expansion. Song birds are rare and diminishing in number, and such as remain are still avidly pursued by young boys. The migratory birds caught seasonally along the mountain crests continue to return annually, but even they come in smaller flocks than in past years.

A few officials, both local and national, have endeavored to save the Cordillera's wildlife, but all actions have been futile. In 1970, the state declared a large part of the upper Agno basin a game refuge, evidently an empty gesture (Baguio Midland Courier Oct. 4, 1970). Some conservationists saw in martial law a potential wildlife reprieve, since most guns were confiscated (Baguio Midland Courier July 22, 1973); indeed, Kabayan residents credit this move for the survival of the deer herd below Natubleng. But habitat destruction and population expansion join as an inexorable force against which wild animals cannot stand.

Within recorded history, the Cordillera has not supported abun-

dant wildlife; the scarcity of large fauna is repeatedly noted by nineteenth-century German travelers. But this does not make the current destruction of wildlife any less tragic. Nor is faunal extinction the only concern; many of the cloud forest's numerous endemic plants may well be exterminated within the next few decades. While most local residents decry this loss, they, like the Bureau of Parks and Wildlife, cannot prevent it; to do so they would have to counteract enormously powerful forces, cultural as well as economic. For even if agricultural expansion could somehow be contained, the young men of the community show no inclination to abstain from hunting any animal, however rare it might be.