BANTAY
GOBYERNO
Ike
Señeres
Do not be alarmed, but
the barbecued chicken that you are ordering from your favorite fast food
restaurant may be causing the water shortage that we are now experiencing. Not
only that, it may also be causing the worsening of global warming that is also killing
many plants and animals in our planet.
This is now a
different world. Who would have thought that the plastic bag that you used to
take home your barbecued chicken might be the same plastic that ended up in the
stomach of the whale that died due to too much ingestion of garbage?
The
correlation might be remote, and that is why it would really be difficult to
imagine what your barbecued chicken has to do with the water shortage and
global warming.
To go
direct to the point, the demand for barbecued food has in turn created a demand
for wooden charcoal, and that is where my story begins. For so long a time now,
perhaps even going back before the Spanish period, forest dwellers have been
slashing and burning trees in the forest, for the purpose of converting these
into wooden charcoal.
For so many
years now, these people have been called “slash and burn farmers” but I
disagree with that because I would rather call them “illegal loggers”, simply
because they are not even “farmers”, so to speak. By some stretch of my
imagination, I would agree to call them “farmers” if they go into actual “tree
farming”, but that is just about as vague as requiring logging concessionaires
to do their own reforestation.
Aside
from the commercial demand for wooden charcoal, there is also a huge
residential demand, because for the most part, the price of liquefied petroleum
gas (LPG) has now gone beyond the budget of many people, perhaps including even
the middle class.
This is a
problem that has caused yet another problem, and that is the problem of
substituting LPG with wood or wooden charcoal. This is a situation that has
somehow put us between the devil and the deep blue sea, because we do not seem
to have a way out now, not unless the price of LPG will go lower.
Actually, the
use of LPG is also a problem, because the production of LPG causes carbon
emissions that in turn accelerate global warming. So what is the way out?
It may sound
simplistic to you, but to me, the only way to meet the demand for charcoal is
to increase the supply of wood and similar materials and there is no other way
to do that except reforestation or tree farming, in other words.
If you ask
me, I will tell you that trees that could produce food or food by-products
should be given the priority in choosing the species to be planted, and because
of that, bamboos would qualify, because it produces edible bamboo shoots.
Strictly
speaking, a bamboo is not a tree because it is actually a grass, but never mind
that because its trunk could be processed into charcoal and that is really the
main point of our discussion here. By the way, sugar cane is also a grass, but
it produces food, and the stalks could be processed into charcoal briquettes.
Just as the demand
for food could not be stopped, the demand for cooking fuels could also not be
stopped. Either the government subsidizes the price of LPG, or it orders the
production of more charcoal. If it does the latter, there should be a prior
condition, and that is the planting of more trees in the forests that could be
turned into charcoal, and that should include bamboos.
I know that I
might sound like I am going around the bush, but what I am really trying to say
here is that instead of going after the small scale “illegal loggers” who are
continuing to deplete our standing inventory of trees, we should turn charcoal
manufacturing into an industry, since it already has a global demand.
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