Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
burden, the more knowledge, capital and scale are needed to handle it. This tends
to exclude smaller and less endowed players. Though this may sometimes be advis-
able, e.g. when small firms are intrinsically more polluting per unit of product than
large enterprises are, the exclusionary effect is strongly perverse in our case. The
regulatory burden on the legal gmelina trade is such that the smallholder growers
are effectively excluded, while the regulatory burden on the illegal forest species
trade is not enough to exclude the capitalist players, once they have organized to
grab the windfall profits. The effect of this is aggravated by the fact that gmelina
and illegal timber compete on the same furniture and constructions markets. The
bad here actively drives out the good. As a result, the gmelina market has remained
undeveloped.
As analyzed by Ostrom (1990), fine-graded regulations (or 'graded sanctions' as
she calls them) are a characteristic of strong, enduring resource management sys-
tems. This rule has its logical flipside too, namely that only strong governments or
strong community organizations can afford fine-grained regulations. It is just like a
woman in Tanzania once told one of the authors when questioned why her particular
community kept up a total cattle ban in the area: “Of course, a few cows would do
no harm at all. Only, our community simply does not have the capacity to maintain
such a [fine-grained] regulation!” If such institutional capacity does not exist, fine-
grained regulations become infested by moral hazard and/or overwhelming moni-
toring problems. In our case, for instance, proof of ownership of gmelina timber
- which is a heavy burden to begin with in a country like the Philippines where
bureaucracy leaves much to be desired - boils down to papers that the smallholder
needs to beg (or pay) off at the DENR. The same holds for the resource use permit
for gmelina and the certificate of registration. All these are unnecessary for any
rational objective DENR could have with them. No gmelina comes from the natural
forest, inventory of gmelina stocks can much better be done with remote sensing or
surveys, and DENR has no task in ensuring against wood theft among neighbors.
A likewise picture emerges from the 'wood recovery permit' used to transport logs
from natural forests out of the region. The permit's fine-grained rationality of pre-
venting a few logs to rot in the forest stands in no balance to the risk of losing the
whole forest through this permit.
The reasons behind this state of affairs may be many. First of all, we cannot
exclude that our own interpretation here may be incorrect. Possibly too, it is simply
a case of temporary administrative confusion. Possibly moreover, it expresses a gut
reaction of the agency to remain 'owner' of the 'problem', even if the problem is
something else and others might be better positioned to solve it. A final hypothesis
is that the prime function served by all these certificates and permits is to maintain
a steady flow of extra-legal income to some of those who man the offices and
checkpoints. In any case the results, as we have seen, are a disaster for the legal
timber market and the natural forest alike.
Addressing the basic imbalance of de facto over-regulation of the legal market
and under-regulation of the illegal market appears to be the necessary basis for any
rectification of the current situation. Different from other cases where farmer-
grown (or legal) and natural-forest (or illegal) wood is difficult to distinguish (ASB
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