GOA, Camarines Sur -- Mt. Isarog is a “protected area” for concerned government agencies and source of potable water of towns and Naga City at its base but reports said that the Partido side of the mountain has been ravaged by timber poachers from upland villages of Goa and Lagonoy towns.

A former barangay captain and now head of local NGO, “Pinagsarong Kusog Bantay Isarog (PKBI),” Josephine Barandon revealed that unabated cutting of second generation trees and hardwood varieties have denuded hectares of forest cover in Bgy. Digdigon, Goa.

Barandon said the trees were cut for timber and charcoal-making by local residents, sold the by-product to as far as Laguna province.        She also said that timber poachers cut massively trees in a protected watershed area in upland Sitio Macabebe in Digdigon, indicating that the forest cover will be over in over one year.

Recent reports of rampant illegal logging had been aired by local radio but Goa Mayor Antero Lim said that illegal logging occured only in the remote mountain village of Catagbacan near Mt. Isarog.

Local informants, however, said that a “local official” is allegedly responsible for illegal logging in the area.

Lim said the local official is a municipal councilor who is lone lumber dealer in the town reportedly given a permit by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) in neighboring Lagonoy town.

It was learned from a local source that in upland Bgy. Pinamihagan, Lagonoy, hundreds of tree stumps are similarly ravaged by charcoal traders.

After a series of typhoons, some 2,000 local residents of Pinamihagan had given up coconut and rice farming while many others lost their jobs after a local chromite mining firm was ordered closed by the DENR.

An official at the DENR district office in Goa claimed that rampant denudation of forest cover is not reported to them due to lack of forest rangers in the protected areas.