Signs of the times for 2008
It’s Monday, January 7, 2008. Although offices have opened as early as January 2, it is only this morning that I sit at my desk at the Education for Life Foundation. Am waiting for our staff conversations on what we want to do and need to do together in 2008.
The first week of 2008 has passed rather quickly, and I realize that there are just 51 weeks left! Need to shift mind-gears, from the reflective pace of the holiday break, to the accelerating rhythm of regular work days.
Briefly, Kierkegaard’s aphorism intrudes: “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.” I think back to the past week for signs pointing to what to watch out for in the coming weeks.
On the first day of January, I was with my mother and sister in Naujan. The year-end rains on the deforested mountain range had swollen the silted rivers, and flood waters steadily rose until they lapped at the bottom steps of our house before night fall.
My earliest recollection of flooding in Naujan was in the 1950s, when the town plaza was submerged. It took almost 50 years before the second big flood came, in the mid-90s. It was the day after Christmas, and the swift muddy currents made me look for a rope to tie our baby daughter Ayen to me. To our relief, the water stopped rising just an inch below the elevated bamboo floor of the house.
My mother’s nipa house survived that flood. But not in December 2006, when two powerful storms brought added wind and rain that uprooted trees and electric power posts, and tore off the roofs and walls of houses.
Again, I anxiously watched the flood waters rise until they stopped one step below the elevated floor of my aunt’s house where we had taken our refuge. Later, I told friends in the electric coop movement that the weeks without electricity made me appreciate what I take for granted. Thanks to the help of PENELCO from Bataan and other sister-coops, power lines were restored faster than expected.
Since then, Mindoro has been hit by more than the usual number of typhoons. And even without the typhoons, there have been more frequent flooding. There are obvious reasons - trees have been cut, legally and illegally, and the major rivers are heavily silted; one has even changed course. But in addition, we cannot discount that this may be a case of climate change hitting us close to home.
Climate change did come up in my conversations in Bancuro, Naujan, where I visited the ruins of the oldest church in Mindoro - Simbahang Bato. Out of curiosity, I also dropped by the newly-opened Benilda Resort, and had an interesting talk with Art Frias, the owner. He made his money in solid and liquid waste treatment in Laguna, and decided to put part of it into Bancuro, the home village of his wife.
But he was more excited to show me his pilot crop of sweet sorghum, and the pilot machine for squeezing the juice from its stalks. “Can we work together to promote this in Mindoro?” he asked me. “I plan to set up a processing plant for ethanol as our contribution to mitigating global warming.” It is also a sunrise industry, and he is entrepreneurial.
Back in Quezon City, Girlie and I were talking about this and what else 2008 may bring into our life, when the phone rang. That led to a hurriedly arranged meeting at the Department of Energy, with Usec. Mon Santos. He was one of my jailers at Camp Bago Bantay, but is now in charge of renewable energy at DOE. He is also co-chair of the task force on climate change, headed by DOE Sec. Angelo Reyes.
We met with his staff for renewable energy, and a team from UP Los Banos who are doing the research into jathropa and other biomass sources of biofuel. Mon expressed concern that the policies and incentives on biofuels have been put in place way ahead of the technology. Also, and this was why he asked me to the meeting, he wanted to promote a more community-based approach to growing the sources of biofuels.
The volume of biofuels that is mandated by the law to be mixed with fossil fuel is huge. The conventional calculation is that it may need as many as 2 million additional hectares of land for the various biomass sources. But if the main system of production used is the traditional large plantation, Mon worries that it will also reproduce the traditional problems of inequality and social unrest.
So how do we achieve the needed scale and yet insure that small farmers and local communities and coops have their needed share?
As if I didn’t have enough questions on my plate, I got to hear a challenging counterfoil from Ted Mendoza, also from UP Los Banos. He spoke last Saturday at a policy forum on “burning issues in the countryside” convened by the Alliance for Rural Concerns. Among them are the 19 RP-China agreements on agriculture, fisheries and biofuels, the coco levy fund, the extension of CARP in 2008.
Ted addressed the issue of biofuels, and punctured the science and economics of the arguments that hype biofuels as the next big thing, not just for addressing global warming and the energy crisis, but also for poverty reduction. I thought that he made some very telling points, and I will blog about them after getting a response from the scientists and economists whom I met at the DOE.
I didn’t stay to the end of the ARC forum, since Girlie was waiting for me at Trimona where we briefed two first-time visitors to the Philippines who plan to do an indie film on Amerasians. One is the daughter of her friend Genevive, a rich oil heiress from Texas who got married to an italian Marxist and who has written on the “gift economy.” She does a lot of giving, and has a lot to give. We didn’t get around to asking her daughter how her children dealt with that.
From there, Ning and Juju Tan picked us up to attend Gilda Cordero-Fernando’s painting exhibit at Rockwell Plaza. Gilda looked radiant and golden at 77, and we could only wonder at the energy that went into the more than 60 watercolor paintings on display. Girlie whispered to her, “We can’t afford to buy one of your paintings, but can we have an ex-deal, one of Ed’s paintings for one of yours?”
Ning circulated briskly among the crowd; she said afterwards that she knew 80% of them. Not me and Girlie; I think we barely knew 20%. In fact Gilda tells us that she wonders why she feels that we are close friends even though we see each other perhaps once a year, and our social circles do not overlap.
I discovered one overlap that relates to art, since I got to sit with Chito Sobrepena of the Metrobank Foundation. He told me that they have extended their annual awards to the arts, and he got to know Gilda when she served on the board of judges.
“How far is Pinamalayan from Naujan?” He asked me. I said it is about an hour and a half to two hours away. I asked back: “Why are you interested in Pinamalayan?”
It turned out that Metrobank has set up a company that is into power and energy, which had acquired the power plant located in Pinamalayan. “I have been asked to guide the corporate social responsibility programs of that company,” Chito explained.
That started another conversation about Mindoro. When I last talked with Romy Cuasay, the general manager of ORMECO, he said that the power supply available in Oriental Mindoro is just enough to meet existing demand. But with the opening of the MetroManila to Western Visayas “nautical highway,” the traffic through Mindoro will spur growth, and higher demand for energy. What will be the source of that needed energy?
Presumably not from bunker fuel plants. We have to consider the oil price hike and uncertainties of supply, plus concerns for global warming. For similar environmental reasons, even the newer and supposedly cleaner coal-based technology will face a lot of resistance.
Biomass then, and biofuels? After hearing the two conflicting scientific and economic calculations, I favor following the “precautionary principle” especially since there is a rapid build up of hype for biofuels.
Years back when I was still in TESDA, I met with a small group of Mindoro social and environmental activists and explored what one project we could push government to develop that would help Mindoro. We settled on water - probably a number of dams that would generate power, provide irrigation, mitigate or manage floods, and provide safe drinking water.
Efren Garcellano told us that a British firm had been doing feasibility studies on four possible sites. More recently, after the 2006 flood, I have been told that a Norwegian grant is financing a more comprehensive water management study covering the area of the capital city of Calapan and neighboring towns. Meth Jimenez has given start-up money for a “million trees” project, beginning with the town of San Teodoro.
Some synergy is waiting to happen in Mindoro this 2008.
