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Monday, February 20, 2012

The fresh and the rotten

By Dinah S. Ventura

Good news from the tourism sector has landed on my desk as of this writing. Announcement from Agoda.com says Palawan and Tagaytay, two of the places Filipinos consider as the best summer destinations, have made it to the global hotel booking site’s list of Asia’s Fresh Destinations 2012. This list began last year, and is said to “aggregate traveler booking data and customer reviews and ratings to identify Asian destinations that have showed a marked increase in popularity over a span of 12 months.”

Among locals, Palawan and Tagaytay have always been popular places to visit: The former for its beautiful island resorts and natural wonders, the latter for its cool climate almost year-round. Both enjoy natural beauty, protected and preserved by both local government and residents.

The truth is, many places in the Philippines are breathtaking or unique in their own way, but only some have been blessed with tourist potential. Tourism, which is the natural answer to our economic difficulties, holds much promise if only we get our act together.

The positive perception being spread by sites like Agoda, as well as travel publications and word-of mouth reviews from satisfied tourists, has already given us a boost. Now it is up to all of us to make sure this is maintained and improved, but I don’t mean cementing anything and everything or painting over natural colors with garish shades in the mistaken notion that these are pleasing to visitors from first world countries.

What makes our country beautiful is its natural bounty, and for too long this has been either neglected or destroyed.

Agoda’s latest list notes Palawan “for its quintessential island holiday offerings, and “some of the world’s best diving.” Noteworthy, too, of course, is the Puerto Princesa Underground River, “already a Unesco World Heritage site, (and) has been recently inaugurated as one of the New7Wonders of Nature.” The latter is a triumph for us all, largely achieved through the city government of Puerto Princesa, led by Mayor Edward Hagedorn, for its efforts to keep the place pristine and that people would know it.

Meanwhile, Tagaytay is recognized for its “complementing fresh air and undulating terrain, smattering of historic buildings, flower farms, golf courses and waterfalls that keep tourists calmly occupied.” While development has surely found its way to this cool city close to Metro Manila, its natural beauty remains a lure to locals, who frequent this weekend getaway. Its fresh air, fresh fruits and vegetables, colorful flowers and native products make Tagaytay as near to Baguio as locals would like.

Under all this bounty and wonder, however, lie some unpleasant issues.

Palawan has long been regarded as our country’s last frontier because of its relatively pristine environment. Logging and mining issues, however, have long made us wonder about the level of conservation being undertaken in that province.

A report on gmanetwork.com states: “With a land area of 1.5 million hectares, Palawan is the country’s largest province in terms of size. Almost half of it is forested — 724,176 hectares as of the last inventory of forest in the Philippines in 2003. Palawan tops the list of provinces with the biggest forest cover in the country, with Cagayan and Isabela ranking a far second and third.”

Illegal logging in places similar to Palawan has been a bane to the people’s existence. The people in Cagayan de Oro City experienced its effects first-hand when tropical storm “Sendong” blew into town. Whether or not logging was being done in CdO’s watershed areas or in the ARMM’s Lanao area, the truth of the matter was out there floating in the floodwaters and taking property and lives along with them.

And then there are the other rich resources. Current Palawan Gov. Abraham Khalil Mitra, for instance, is embroiled in an issue with the group Kilusang Love Malampaya (KLM) over the Malampaya natural gas project off northern Palawan, which the latter says compromised Palawan’s interest.

Meanwhile the issue of slain broadcaster and anti-mining advocate Gerry Ortega remains unresolved to this day. Ortega’s family wants the Justice department to allow the filing of a murder case against former Palawan Governor Joel Reyes, “who was absolved by the first panel of prosecutors that investigated the case,” a report says.

The same former governor, according to Ernesto Herrera in his newspaper column, is being recommended by the Commission on Audit for alleged “misuse of billions of pesos of the province’s share from the Malampaya natural gas project,” he writes. It was this same topic that supposedly got the radio commentator Ortega in trouble.

In other words, all efforts to promote growth and development in many parts of our country will be for naught unless the problems with graft and corruption are also resolved at the same time.

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