Partido side of Mount Isarog getting denuded at alarming rate

GOA, Camarines Sur (Oct 10, 2011) - Mt. Isarog, a protected area and the main source of potable water for a city and several municipalities surrounding its base is getting deforested at an alarming rate particularly in the Partido side of this province.

Logging has long been prohibited in Mount Isarog and its continuing destruction is blamed on the usual culprits - the timber poachers and the charcoal makers in the upland barangays in the towns of Goa and Lagonoy.

Josephine Barandon, a former barangay captain and now head of local NGO, "Pinagsarong Kusog Bantay Isarog" (PKBI), said that unabated cutting of second generation trees of hard wood varieties has denuded hundreds of hectares of forest cover in Digdigon, a barangay in Goa located at the base of Mt. Isarog.

Barandon said, big trees are cut for commercial timber and left overs are burned into charcoal. She noted that in recent months, many local residents are now engaged in the illegal activity of transporting hundreds of sacks of charcoal to Laguna province by trucks.

A protected watershed area in sitio Macabebe in upland Digdigon is not spared by the poachers, Barandon said. adding that at the rate rate poachers are cutting trees, the local uplands will be bare in the coming year.

Recent reports of rampant illegal logging were aired by local radio network, but Goa Mayor Antero Lim said that the said illegal activity occur only in the remote mountain village of Catagbacan at the town’s boundary with Lagonoy.

But local informants here said that a government official is actually involved in the lucrative logging trade in this locality.

Mayor Lim said that only one lumber yard is in business in this town and it is reportedly owned by a municipal councilor who was given a permit DENR to log an area in neighbouring Lagonoy town.

It was also revealed by a local source that in upland barangay of Pinamihagan, Lagonoy, a few hundreds of tree stumps are all that remain in a vast area that used to be forested.