One Tree, Two Birds

Every time the rains come and parts of Iloilo City and province become water parks, we ask the same question: why aren’t the floodways bigger? Then, when we visit a hardware store to buy wood for a home repair, we ask another: why is lumber so expensive? We treat these as separate frustrations, one an act of nature and the other a quirk of the market. But what if they are two symptoms of the same disease?

Last week, over 1,400 of the nation’s top forestry experts gathered in Iloilo City and delivered a sobering diagnosis. Our landscapes are failing us twice over. They fail to hold back the water that drowns our streets, and they fail to produce the resources we need to build our homes. The root of both problems is the same: our hillsides are bare.

According to DENR Region 6 Executive Director Raul Lorilla, Western Visayas has a mere 12 percent actual forest cover. The ideal, he said, is between 48 to 52 percent. This isn’t just an abstract ecological target. That massive 36-point deficit is a direct cause of our woes. As Philippine Forestry Education Network President Marlo Mendoza explained during the conference, flooding isn’t just an infrastructure problem. “It’s better if there are preventive measures, which are vegetative — meaning plants,” he urged.

Without a multi-layered canopy of trees, shrubs, and grasses on our slopes, heavy rain washes away topsoil. This soil, or silt, chokes our rivers, making them shallower. Mendoza cited the tragic case of Laguna Lake, which has lost nearly 80% of its depth to siltation. “When the lake is silted, there is no more space to hold the water — where will it go? It will overflow,” he warned. That is precisely what happens in our own river basins. We can dredge and build higher walls, but it’s like bailing water from a boat with a massive hole in it. The problem starts upstream.

At the same time this ecological failure is flooding our homes, an economic failure is emptying our wallets. Atty. Roberto Oliva, President of the Society of Filipino Foresters, Inc. (SFFI), pointed out a humiliating irony. “Can you imagine a country that is as rich as the Philippines in terms of natural resources… now we’re importing 70 to 80 percent,” he said. We were once a top wood exporter. Today, we pay other countries for a resource that should be generating jobs and wealth right here in our province.

This is not an unsolvable contradiction. The solution to our flood crisis is the same solution to our resource crisis. It is a unified vision for our land.

This vision requires a two-pronged strategy. First, we must heed Mendoza’s call and establish protection forests in our watersheds and geohazard zones. These are not for logging but for healing—dense, diverse plantings that anchor the soil, absorb rainfall, and act as a natural sponge. This is everyone’s responsibility, especially private landowners on sloping terrain.

Second, we must embrace Oliva’s challenge and develop production forests. On suitable lands, we must empower farmers and investors to plant trees as a commercial crop. This will fuel a sustainable local timber industry, create rural livelihoods, and finally end our absurd dependence on imported wood.

The Iloilo provincial government’s goal of becoming a “forest province” is a powerful and commendable start. Now is the time to put a clear, strategic plan behind that vision. It’s a plan that sees a tree as both a shield against disaster and a seed for prosperity. By solving our forest deficit, we solve our flood and economic deficits at the same time. It is the single most important investment we can make for a safer, wealthier Iloilo.