Labor migration and sustainable resource management : A case of the Philippines

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This study attempts to document the environmental degradation and survival strategies of inhabitants in upland areas. Followings are major findings.(1) A great number of people have migrated from lowland to upland areas where deforestation was done by the commercial logging opperations for the past decades.(2) Our rural-upland migration hypothesis is clearly supported.(3) Although migrants from lowlands start practicing swidden agriculture at the beginning, they intensify their land use once they introduce commercial crops.(4) Major culprits for forest disappearance are not population increase, but the government policies on forest development, encouragement of commercial logging for the external debt payment, enclosure of public land by forest concessionaires, construction of timber road, employment absorption of logging workers.(5) Factors that accelerate upland migration are deprivation of land rights of natives by modern system of land ownership, eviction of tenant farmers by landlords, agricultural commercialization, conversion of agricultural land for the development of industrial estates in suburban areas.