Palawan News is publishing in full a letter from a group of academics and researchers responding to our recent reporting on kaingin and deforestation in Palawan, including government data attributing 77.4 percent of forest loss to the practice.
As a matter of editorial policy, Palawan News welcomes commentaries, rejoinders, and other responses to its stories, particularly from readers, sources, and specialists who wish to raise questions, offer additional context, or challenge how an issue was framed. We view this as part of our accountability to the public and the communities we cover. Publishing a letter does not constitute an endorsement of its contents by this publication. It is offered as a contribution to public discussion on a matter of significant consequence to Palawan’s upland and indigenous communities.
We invite the government agencies named or referred to in this letter to respond. We also remain open to further reporting that examines the methodology behind the kaingin figures cited in our previous coverage.
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We are deeply alarmed by recent statements from Palawan-based media outlets citing government agencies that deforestation in Palawan is largely due to kaingin, and proposing that people living in mountain areas be “brought down” and relocated to population centers to solve the kaingin “problem.” We strongly oppose this initiative to displace upland communities and eradicate swidden farming, and call on the relevant agencies to withdraw it immediately.
This relocation proposal is historically uninformed, empirically inaccurate, and politically dangerous. It undermines the meaning of Palawan’s UNESCO Man and Biosphere Reserve designation, which should recognize the relationship between people and nature rather than treat upland communities as threats to be removed. For centuries, Palawan’s Indigenous communities have practiced kaingin in ways that sustain and enrich the island’s forests. Their labor and ecological knowledge have helped shape the biodiversity for which Palawan is known. Yet kaingin is now being named as the province’s leading cause of deforestation, while relocation to the lowlands and “alternative livelihoods” are presented as a solution. This revives a discredited tradition of blaming Indigenous peoples, migrants, and poor rural households for forest loss while obscuring the structural conditions that have pushed them into precarious livelihoods and enabled large-scale forest clearing around them.
The title of the article alone in Palawan News is disturbing – it uses the phrase “hit by kaingin” as if kaingin were a disease, epidemic, or natural disaster descending upon Palawan’s forests, rather than a livelihood strategy practiced by Indigenous peoples for centuries. It recasts their livelihoods as criminal activity to be contained and strips them of history and agency. To speak of communities as areas “hit by kaingin” is to treat their survival itself as a threat. It invites fear and removal, when what is needed is a grounded understanding of poverty, landlessness, insecure tenure, weak public support, and the unequal political economy of forest use in Palawan.
We also object to the continued use of the phrase “slash-and-burn farming.” It reduces rotational farming, forest fallow, regeneration, mixed cropping, and Indigenous stewardship into a crude image of fire, destruction, and backwardness. The phrase has long stigmatized upland farmers as reckless forest destroyers, even when their practices are shaped by ecological knowledge, seasonal rhythms, land scarcity, and survival under marginalization. The continued use of this language suggests that government agencies have learned little from decades of work showing that not all forest clearing is the same, not all upland farming is destructive, and not all uses of fire are ecologically irrational. Research has shown that Indigenous swidden agriculture is often smaller in scale, agroecologically diverse, and supported by fallow periods that sustain important ecosystem services.
The claim that kaingin accounts for 77.4 percent of forest loss must be treated with caution rather than repeated as an “uncomfortable truth.” A percentage that precise can create the illusion of certainty while concealing the politics of classification behind it. What exactly was counted as kaingin? Who classified it, using what method, and with what field verification? Did the data distinguish rotational swidden from permanent conversion, subsistence clearing from commercial expansion, Indigenous land use from migrant settlement, fallow cycles from new deforestation, charcoal-linked clearing from farming, or poor households clearing land from powerful actors financing or benefiting from forest conversion? Satellite images may show forest loss, burn scars, or land-cover change, but they cannot by themselves identify social relations, tenure histories, market pressures, coercion, poverty, or livelihood necessity. To collapse all these into “kaingin” is a political act, not a neutral technical exercise.
Before government agencies speak of relocating upland communities, they must disclose exactly how the 77.4 percent figure was produced. Without transparent methods, disaggregated categories, public maps, ground-level verification, and community participation, the number risks becoming a weapon of blame: a way of giving scientific authority to an old prejudice against upland people.
We also reject the false geography embedded in the relocation proposal: the assumption that population centers and lowlands are places of order, legality, and sustainable employment, while upland settlements are spaces of disorder, danger, and ecological harm. Lowland and urban centers are themselves marked by landlessness, insecure work, informal settlements, indebtedness, exclusion from services, and dependence on precarious labor. To “bring people down” is no guarantee of livelihood, dignity, or sustainability; it may simply move poverty from the mountains to the roadside, the urban periphery, or the informal labor market. Upland residence and upland farming cannot be treated as automatically destructive. Many upland communities have sophisticated forms of governance, cosmology, rotational cultivation, and forest management shaped by ecological knowledge and necessity. The problem is not the presence of people in the uplands. The problem is the absence of secure rights, public support, accountable markets, and serious alternatives that allow people to live without being forced into ecologically fragile and politically vulnerable livelihoods.
Palawan’s forests must be protected, but not by reviving old prejudices against upland people. While upland communities are blamed for forest loss, regulatory decisions continue to open ecologically sensitive areas, including zones under the ECAN framework, to extractive and commercial pressures. Public records show that at least 218,854 trees have already been marked for destruction under “Special Tree Cutting and Earth-Balling Permits” linked to mining operations in Palawan. This figure is staggering not only because of the number of trees involved, but because each permit authorizes disruption to a living system of which Indigenous livelihoods, including kaingin, are a vital part. The rush to blame kaingin diverts attention from mining, road building, market pressures, insecure land rights, weak public support, and the political decisions that make forests vulnerable in the first place.
Relocation rests on a dangerous fiction: that moving upland people to the lowlands moves them into order, opportunity, and sustainability. Government agencies must stop treating upland communities as problems to be moved and start confronting the deeper causes of forest loss: poverty, insecure land rights, destructive commercial pressures, and the failure to provide dignified, viable alternatives. Forest protection must work with upland and Indigenous communities, not against them. It must not become displacement by another name. Any policy built on forced relocation or swidden eradication would risk violating international norms on Indigenous rights and the country’s own Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act of 1997.
Signatories
(Signing in their personal capacity; institutional affiliations are provided for identification purposes only)
Dr Wolfram H. Dressler, Professor of Human Geography, University of Melbourne
Dr Eric D U Gutierrez, Honorary Senior Research Fellow, University of Melbourne
Dr Melanie McDermott, Senior Researcher, The College of New Jersey
Dr Marvin Joseph F. Montefrio, Associate Professor, National University of Singapore
Dr Dario Novellino, Honorary Senior Research Fellow, University College London (UCL), UK
Dr Will Smith, Plan International, Melbourne, Australia
Dr Noah Theriault, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Carnegie Mellon University
Arvin Jake Adovo, PhD candidate, University of Melbourne
Ana Christina M. Bibal, Alumnus, University of the Philippines, Los Baños
