ABSTRACT
The rapid loss of forest in the Philippines, which began in the 1890s, has transformed huge areas, once rich with vegetation, into grassland. According to the Master Plan for Forestry Development devised in 1990, the Philippines had about 16 million hectares of primary forest remaining in the 1950s. However, wanton logging, combined with slash-and-burn cultivation (locally known as kaingin farming), reduced the country’s area of natural forest to less than 1 million hectares by the 1990s. Removal of protective cover on this scale, over just four decades, degraded the soil over large areas. It is estimated that grasslands now cover more than 6.5 million hectares, or approximately 22% of the country’s total land area (Concepcion and Samar 1995). This is believed to be the final product of this denudation of the land (Myers 1993).
