Growth Performance of Rubber Latex Timber Clones Under Selected Mining Areas in Zamboanga Peninsula
Researcher-Meynard P. Abello and Gilbert D. Rance (On-going)
Of the country’s total land area of 30 million hectares, some 9 million hectares have been identified as having “high mineral potential”, said the Mines and Geosciences Bureau (MGB). As of January 2012, the bureau estimated that some 3.8 percent (around 1.14 million ha) of the Philippines’ total land area was covered by mining tenements. The major impact of mining on the environmental that people around the globe are surprisingly ignorant about is mainly due to the physical damage of the landscape and the production of large volume of harmful wastes (Ghose, 20014). With the destruction of forestal area due to increasing exploitation of natural minerals, climate change is also one of the manifestations with this human activity. As of September, 2017Mines and Geosciences Bureau (MGB) presents the mining tenement map in Zamboanga Peninsula which includes most municipalities in Zamboanga del Sur, Zamboanga del Norte and Zamboanga Sibugay (DENR, 2017). With the exploitation of natural resources, prime agricultural lands such as plantations and other properties devoted to valuable crops will be sacrificed to mining. Rubber latex timber clones can be planted to replace destructed forest trees for reforestation as it can also create employment for the unemployed rubber tappers. With the low production of natural rubber latex, mining areas can be utilized for rubber plantation expansion so that our country can also contribute to the increasing demand of natural rubber in the world market. In order also to mitigate the problem on climate change, increasing the numbers of trees planted can be also done by using latex timber clones to be planted on denuded mining field.
