Rangers losing battle in Philippine forests

Terra Daily via AFP: Father-of-five Alex Lesber patrols one of the Philippines' most important forests carrying a cheap pistol and memories of a pastor being shot dead in front of him. Lesber is one of just 2,000 poorly paid rangers trying to stop what the government admits is "rampant" illegal logging across the country, and their time roaming amid the vanishing forests is becoming increasingly dangerous.

Twenty of his colleagues have been murdered since the government imposed a nationwide logging ban in 2010, according to the environment ministry, a move that prompted already shady timber merchants to adopt more aggressive tactics.

"There is always that possibility that one of us could get hurt where we work. We arrest people, so naturally they hate us," Lesber, 49, told AFP while patrolling Angat forest, one of the main watersheds for Manila's dams.

The stakes are high for the Philippines, a tropical Southeast Asian nation of more than 7,000 islands that has lost more than half its forest cover over the past century. There are only 7.6 million hectares (18.78 million acres) left to be guarded by men like Lesber. But the Philippines' forest rangers are under-funded, out-numbered and extremely vulnerable, according to Environment Secretary Ramon Paje.

"Fighting illegal logging should be a considered a military operation, rather than a regulatory one. We want the army at the forefront, rather than our rangers," he told reporters recently. One of the problems for the rangers is that corrupt government officials are often involved in the timber industry, according to environment activists. This is part of a broader scourge across the Philippines of underpaid local officials or security forces being enticed into lucrative but illegal businesses....

Arroceros Forest Park in Manila, Philippines, shot by Edgar Dann Alcantara, Sheena Thea Alcantara, Sheera Thea Alcantara (Wikipedia Takes Manila participant), Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license