Qwertyman No. 90: Postscript to Masungi

Qwertyman for Monday, April 22, 2024

SENATE PRESIDENT Pro Tempore and environmental champion Loren Legarda did the right and necessary thing last week when she called on the Bureau of Corrections to desist from building prisons or offices on land it supposedly owns in the Masungi Georeserve in Tanay, Rizal. 

For unfathomable reasons, former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo awarded BuCor 270 hectares in 2006 for new headquarters and a New Bilibid Prison in the heart of Masungi, a protected area that has become an internationally recognized showcase of nature conservation. Following Legarda’s statement, Bucor officials have assured the public that it will not push through with its plans, and will instead just build facilities for a detachment of forest rangers who will protect Bucor’s lot.

That’s still not the best solution—which would be the revocation of the land grant, given that prisons have no place in Masungi or any protected area for that matter. But even a reprieve is welcome, as it buys time for the national government to take a long, hard look at what’s happening in Masungi, where the threat of new construction pales in comparison to what’s already been built there.

I first wrote about Masungi last January, when I visited the 3,000-hectare georeserve along the border of Tanay and Baras, Rizal. It’s a critical stretch of land that’s not only home to some of the country’s rarest and most threatened species such as the purple jade vine and Masungi microsnail—as well as 72 kinds of birds—but also helps protect Metro Manila from catastrophic flooding because of the watershed it sits on. 

The place has had a long and complicated history, from the time the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) tried to use it for employee housing in the early 1990s to 2017 when its care and supervision was entrusted to the Masungi Georeserve Foundation, Inc. (MGFI) by then DENR Secretary Gina Lopez. Well before and since then, Masungi’s caretakers have battled a host of threats, including landgrabbing by syndicates reportedly backed up by powerful people connected to the government. Aside from the BuCor’s plan to make a prison out of a natural Eden, a wind farm is being built on Masungi by a Singapore-owned company.

But beyond the quarries, resorts, and private houses that have sprung up on the reserve, MGFI president Ben Dumaliang’s main source of worry is the government itself—specifically, the DENR, or what he sees as its inexplicable indifference or even hostility to the foundation and its efforts to preserve and protect Masungi from parties hungry for its land.

I met with Ben recently and he explained to me how many times he had tried to approach DENR officials to get their support for the foundation’s work on the georeserve—an achievement that the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals Action Awards recognized in 2022—but how he has been repeatedly rebuffed, and even threatened with the cancellation of their management contract. “The secretary didn’t even congratulate us for our UN award,” he told me in a voice tinged with sadness and dismay. 

It isn’t really the accolades that Ben and his team—which includes his two daughters and a corps of bright, young forest rangers and volunteers—are after. While they can bank on a deep wellspring of support from the public and most of the media—you can’t go to Masungi without being impressed by the extent and the inescapable beauty of the foundation’s reforestation efforts—they need resolute action from the DENR to enforce its own laws and rules. The cold-shoulder treatment he’s been getting has driven Ben to suspect that “rogue DENR officials” are behind the landgrabbing syndicates plaguing the reserve. 

“They see our foundation as the only hindrance to quarries, resorts, real estate, and many other deals in the protected area. Unfortunately for the environment and the public, these deals cause irreparable harm. Our presence, vigilance, and conservation work in the area have stalled, stopped, and derailed countless syndicates from pillaging the frontline forest that is being swallowed up by creeping urbanization and development,” says Ben.

I saw the irrefutable evidence of this massive encroachment myself on my visit there last January. A whole village—Sitio San Roque in Baras—sits and thrives where a forest should have been (and probably was). I saw a pool resort, mansion-like homes, shops, etc., all on land claimed by the residents to have been legally acquired under the Marcos-era PD 324, which granted free patents to land that it designated alienable and disposable. Ben points out that this is fraudulent, because PD 324 had long since been superseded and nullified by PD 705 and Proclamation 1636, which withdrew the land given out under PD 324 and protected it from settlement, disposition, and development. 

“The three big-time quarries totaling some 1,300 hectares misplaced in Masungi trace their roots also to the PD 324 scam,” Ben alleges. “The quarry owners justify their contracts with claims of private rights derived from PD 324. They were also fooled. They brazenly violate the prohibition against mining in protected areas of at least three laws—Proclamation 1636, the NIPAS Law, and the Mining Act.”

Ben wonders why, in the face of these strong legal arguments, the DENR hasn’t moved against the presumptive squatters in Masungi and has instead refused to meet with the foundation and work with it to defend and protect the georeserve. When I saw him recently, he brought up the same question I raised at the end of my previous column, which I’m asking again: “What do they have against us?” I think that deserves a clear, fair, and not incidentally overdue answer.

Qwertyman No. 78: Fighting Windmills in Masungi

Qwertyman for Monday, January 29, 2024

“ONDOY STARTED here.” If that memory of the catastrophic flood that turned much of Metro Manila into a deadly swamp in 2009 doesn’t chill you, then little else will.

The man telling me this as he sweeps his hand over the vast Upper Marikina Watershed below and around us is Ben Dumaliang. At 68, Ben is exceptionally articulate for a civil engineer, but he needs to be, because he’s no longer just building houses. For almost 30 years, he’s been building the Masungi Georeserve—a 3,000-hectare expanse of mostly forest land on the slopes of the Sierra Madre along the boundary of Tanay and Baras, Rizal.

Masungi sits on the watershed that both nourishes and protects Metro Manila, providing it with fresh water while helping to keep flooding in check—if things like trees and streams are where and how they’re supposed to be. And there’s the problem, that helped a freak downpour like Ondoy become the biblical torrent it turned out to be. 

“Much of this was logged over not too long ago,” says Ben. “We had to reclaim the land from the loggers, the quarry companies, and the land speculators, and then reforest it.”

Today the Masungi Georeserve is about as close to a natural Eden as you can get this close to the city—about 30 kilometers from where I live in Diliman—with lush new growths of Philippine trees, unique plants and animals such as the purple jade vine and the Masungi microsnail, and hundreds of endemic species including 72 kinds of birds.

But it wasn’t always that way, as Ben recalls the georeserve’s unlikely beginning. “This was government land that the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) intended to use for employee housing back in the 1990s. In 1996, my construction company, Blue Star, won the bidding for the housing project, and we began building roads on the property and making improvements on it. However, the land had been chopped up among various syndicates, and the DENR failed to deliver on its obligation to clear the land of settlers, and after a while people lost interest in living here, and the housing project stalled.”

In the meanwhile, Ben had begun to appreciate the natural beauty of the place, despite its ravaged state, and started developing parts of it—particularly the centrally located Lot 10, which remains the hub of the georeserve. He began taking the land back from its illegal settlers, who included rich and powerful people who had put up cottages in the area.

Almost immediately, he began to get blowback. “Our rangers were shot at and mauled when they tried to do their job, and the police did nothing about it.”

Not surprisingly, Ben says that a group of police generals had apportioned parts of the watershed among themselves, citing the Marcos-issued PD 324 which had declared these lands alienable (conveniently forgetting that PD 324 was effectively repealed by Marcos himself under the Forestry Code aka PD 705 and by Presidential Proclamation 1636 prohibiting tree cutting and dwelling in the watershed). 

In 2015, Ben’s daughters Billie and Ann set up the Masungi Georeserve Foundation, to which Blue Star entrusted the care and management of the area. (Ben is a principal in both entities, and both daughters remain active in the foundation.)

It was in 2017 that the most auspicious turn happened for Masungi. Then newly appointed DENR Secretary Gina Lopez visited the place, liked what she saw—particularly what Ben and his people were doing to restore and conserve the forest—and had a contract drawn up between the DENR and the foundation granting it the right and obligation to replant the georeserve. 

Today sturdy growths of Benguet pine crown the hilltops of the watershed. The georeserve is thick and picturesque with trees, orchids, and returning wildlife. A limited number of ecotourists come every day to hike trails that weave through the sharp karst limestone landscape.

But not far below the pine trees, Sitio San Roque in Baras remains host to a bustling community (that reportedly includes, yes, at least one police general and one high-ranking government official who owns a pool resort, against whom a case had been filed but who was allowed to retire with full benefits). “The syndicates and rogue officials are the root cause of deforestation and environmental degradation,” says Ben. “I fear for my life and my family’s,” he admits. “It’s very easy to die in a place like this.” (For more background information, refer to my fellow columnist Jarius Bondoc’s piece from September 13, 2023, titled “DENR ignoring public appeals to evict watershed landgrabbers.”)

The threats are more than personal. Insanely, the Bureau of Corrections managed to secure 270 hectares in the heart of the reserve to build a new national penitentiary and its headquarters there. The DENR also reportedly agreed for Tanay to build wind turbines on the ridge overlooking Lot 10. Neither project can possibly be good for jade vines, microsnails—and people, for that matter.

Some days, Ben feels like he’s fighting windmills in Masungi—and not just the literal ones, either. He doesn’t understand what he sees as the antipathy of the DENR toward him and the foundation. The DENR wants his contract canceled, ostensibly because he had gotten Sec. Lopez to sign it when she was ill and just before she left office after failing to be confirmed (Ben denies this, saying she was the one who insisted on the contract getting done. “They seem to think I’m getting rich from this, but in fact I’ve been drawing from my own resources for the georeserve,” he explains. The MGF gets no funding from the government and relies on its limited income and on private support for its operations.) DENR Sec. Ma. Antonia Yulo-Loyzaga, he says, has ignored all his letters and requests to meet to thresh out any issues between them.

Nature reserves don’t grow just trees—they breed enemies, few of them natural; most walk on two feet.

(On a rather distressing side note, I have good and trustworthy friends on both sides of this issue messaging me to believe this and not to believe that. For the moment, I’ll have to believe the evidence of my eyes, but to be fair, I invite the DENR to send me their comments, and specifically their answer to this simple question: “What is the Masungi Georeserve Foundation doing wrong?”)