DOST’s intervention in 2 South Cotabato lakes reaps job, ecological dividends

It’s science used to restore Nature’s health, providing abundant fish harvests

LAKE BULUAN and LAKE SEBU in South Cotabato could be science’s ideal application of its capability at restoring Nature’s health where humanity’s technological advances and commercial greed have threatened them.

Only up to early this year, water weeds – water hyacinth (Eichornia crassipes) and swamp cabbage or water lettuce (Ipomea aquatic) - have fed on human neglect and have nearly engulfed to extinction these inland water bodies that for centuries have sustained the food and irrigation needs of Lumad, or tribal, communities.

Whether timely, providential or incidental, but a mandated department thrust on livelihood provision and enhancement on the part of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) has arrested the path of demise of the two lakes, which have been closely watched and monitored by two universities.

The Sultan Kudarat Polytechnic State College (SKPSC) has already worked with local residents in the five municipalities around Lake Buluan and has asked the DOST to help them out. The Mindanao State University (MSU) in General Santos City has likewise designed its own action plan for Lake Sebu.

Both universities have included a set of technologies to be applied in the mainly lake cleanup program. The technology focused on extracting usable materials from the lake weeds, sparing experts from resorting to the option of merely dumping them elsewhere and pose additional problem to the already burdened adjacent lake environment.

Early this year, the DOST approved for implementation its economic stimulus package Comprehensive Livelihood and Emergency Employment Program (Cleep) with the two universities and host local governments to work wonder for Lake Buluan and Lake Sebu, which were also the traditional worship and offering sites of the Lumad communities.


CONTROLLING WEED POPULATION

In only a few weeks after the DOST, the SKPSC and the municipal government of Lutayan finalized the work plan of Lake Buluan sometime in April (DOST approved the implementation of the Cleep in Lake Buluan on February 2009), the weed population was conspicuously reduced with the employment of 60 harvesters of the water hyacinth and water lettuce, 60 environment brigade and 50 processors.

During a visit on July 30-31 of the DOST officials, Dr. Jesusa Orteza, dean of the College of Agriculture of the SKPSC said the harvesters manually extract or uproot the hyacinths and lettuces that have taken root in the piles of dead weeds underwater, and piling them up along the bank of the lake for processing.

Similarly, Lake Sebu also did the same also almost simultaneously with that in Lake Buluan, said Dr. Tersa Castillo, dean of the College of Fisheries of MSU-GenSan. She said that the program has hired 1,000 local residents for the lake cleanup, processing of the weeds into handicraft materials. Many of them were hired as Bantay Lawa members.

Both college deans were respectively designated project implementers in the two lakes.

The studies of the two universities have discovered the usable fiber in the water hyacinth, locally called “butete” in the Lutayan area, ascribing similarity of the bloated lower trunk of the hyacinth with the bloated stomach of a local poisonous fish variety called butete.

Orteza said that the fiber was the main material in making slippers, bags, baskets and other handicraft items, which were displayed for evaluation during the launching on Thursday last week (July 30) of the Cleep in Lutayan and in Lake Sebu on Friday.

The design of the slippers was made to provide therapeutic comfort to the feet.

The water lettuce, shaped like a lettuce but which grows to as big as more than one foot in diameter in its crown, was also found to be a good material for vermiculture, or raising and feeding the worm species African night crawlers. The worms feed on these lettuces and excrete the material ideal to feed the tilapia, or as compost in the farms.

The two universities have requested the DOST’s Philippine Council for Aquatic and Marine Research and Development (PCAMRD), for support, especially the member agencies Philippine Textile Research Institute and the Metals Industry Research and Development Center.

“It’s practically a zero waste program while providing employment and increasing productivity of the lake,” said Dr. Rafael D. Guerrero III, recognized as the “Father of Philippine Tilapia”.

He said that they would evaluate still evaluate the request for additional shredder, used to extract the fiber and the shreds, and twining machine, used to make the twines, the materials for the handicrafts.

Orteza said that only the stem of the hyacinth was usable. However, the leaves and the roots were also used for composting.


DIVIDENDS

Miriam Pangulima, 48, of Sitio Buri, a lakeside village in Barangay Lutayan, would be awaiting her first payment of P200, paid every 15 days, for processing the lake weeds, called by their generic name water lilies. Her earning would boost the meager family income earned by her husband, a fisherman and his 32-year-old son, who work as a shop helper.

Sanima Panga, 43, also a processor in Sitio Dungguan, named because her village is where the fishing boats would unload their catch, would now have another source of income than just selling native foods. She only earns as much as P100 as ambulant vendor, but often earned less.

Her little income could now tide her family over from hunger, after her husband was afflicted with pneumonia and remained untreated. Her village could be the most blighted community, with villagers living on small stilt houses just above the water level. The community mosque lay half submerged in water.

“We are very thankful of the project for making us fear the wrath of Nature but appreciating it also for giving us the bounty that have been denied to us because of the ‘butete’,” Panga said.

Orteza said that even without a program to enrich fish production, the dividends of the lake cleanup “even in the Lutayan part of lake, fish catch has already reach 25,000 tons per week, compared to the previous catch of 15,000 tons and dwindling”.

The lake cleanup has netted 3,450 kilograms in the Lutayan part since May but the lake has conspicuously reappeared with more water surfaces than only greeneries from the water lilies that appeared like real land mass inside the lake.

The Lutayan side comprised only ten percent, or 2,500 hectares, of the entire lake area of 25,000 hectares, the third largest lake in Mindanao. There were no lake cleanup program under Cleep in the other four lakeside municipalities, Orteza said. “But it is in this town where the wind direction commonly brings the lake weeds and other wastes from the other parts of the lake to concentrate.”

In Lake Sebu, the home of the famous tinalak fabric and the colourful T’boli tribe, images of the lake cleanup flashed in the video screen during the launching of Cleep, showed substantial reappearance of the lake’s water surface.

Gov. Daisy Avance-Fuentes, said that they have to dredge the lake bed of about six meters of dead lake weed materials to reappear and rejuvenate Lake Lahit (24 hectares), one of the three lakes comprising the Lake Sebu. The other lakes, Seloton (48 hectares) and Sebu (354 hectares), have been restored of its green water, from a near extinction of brownish-colored water.

She has already directed the reduction of fish cages to only ten percent of what was then before “to preserve the lake for the tribal and local population and to restore the health of the lake”.


Model program

DOST Secretary Estrella F. Alabastro said she would lift the experience of the Cleep program in Lake Buluan and Lake Sebu “as our model program of integrated application of technology, ecological conservation, enhancing productivity of natural resource and providing the widest employment opportunity to the disadvantaged local population”.

She said that the livelihood enhancement program in the two lakes have also generated consciousness of the environment.

“We have also other programs that complement all our little efforts at providing assistance to communities, like the one that we have in Aurora, where their coconut coir and twining activities have been used widely for soil erosion and flood control by the Department of Public Works and Highways,” she said.

Felix B. Tamolang, officer-in-charge of the Forest Products Research and Development Institute, also one of the five agencies comprising the PCAMRD, said that the Lake Sebu program has also its ramifications as an ecological conservation program.

“Looking at the contour of the surrounding areas, we would expect residents and government officials to be aware that the lake’s well-being also rely heavily on the conservation and protection of the surrounding forests, especially its watershed,” he said.

He said that water districts in the lowland communities should contribute in programs like watershed protection “because if the sources of water for drinking and for the lake would be destroyed by logging, everything would die also”.

The DOST has poured P5.13 million for the Lake Sebu program and P10.809 million for the Lake Buluan program, but Alabastro reminded the stakeholders in the two lake programs that “we are here only to provide the impetus and the initial funding”.

“The fate of the program would largely rely on your efforts to sustain the program, It’s the sense of ownership that often dictates the success of any program or endeavour,” she said.

- 30 -