In the beginning, the island was covered in forests.
This was the observation of the US Bureau of Forestry following their 1906 survey of Negros, an island in the Philippines. The bureau had been established by the United States to study the nation’s forests, and this report was a way to better understand the natural conditions of the US’s newly acquired colony. “Previous to 1903,” bureau officials wrote, “practically no timber had been exploited, except for local needs,” leaving the newcomers with an auspicious opportunity to explore and extract available resources. This they did in rapacious haste.
Unlike Spain, which had previously occupied the Philippines, the US operated with more urgency, embodying the energy of their nascent empire. In the same document, the bureau reported that in the span of just three years, “from July 1, 1903, to July 1, 1906”, the Americans “logged off about 250 acres” of forestland. That’s roughly equivalent to 134 standard soccer pitches.
Five native trees, all dipterocarps (tropical trees belonging to the family Dipterocarpaceae), were of principal interest to the lumbermen for their commercial potential: apitong (Dipterocarpus grandiflorus), almon (Shorea almon), tanguile (Shorea polysperma), red lauan (Shorea negrosensis), and white lauan (Shorea contorta).
Many of them were old and had grown to be gigantic specimens; red lauan trees towering 200 feet into the air were “not uncommon,” according to the bureau report.
Yet the American lumbermen struggled to find “a market for such varieties,” says scholar Brendan Luyt, because they did not quite know what to make of these exotic creatures. In addition, consumer uncertainty over their quality presented another problem. When wood from such trees did sell, profits were smaller compared to “the more widely known and valuable woods,” Luyt explains. Those “were of course charged at a higher rate than those less well known.”
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The lumbermen scrambled for a solution to make Negros lumber more desirable. They devised a marketing plan engineered to make these alien arbors more familiar to would-be consumers. The short of it entailed misidentifying the trees by assigning them a common trade label which they then prefixed with their place of origin, as some sort of consolation.
These trees were sold as Philippine mahogany.
Grafting Wrong Labels
The decision to classify, or falsify, the trees as “mahogany” was informed by a long established Anglo commercial preference for, and industrial familiarity with, the woods of the genus Swietenia, the genuine mahogany (Swietenia belongs to the plant family Meliaceae). American forestry expert Frank Bruce Lamb explains that for “English and American lumber merchants, ship builders, furniture manufacturers and dealers, architects and antique furniture dealers,” wood derived from Swietenia trees “has been, since as early as 1700, and still is regarded as a standard of excellence.”
The term Philippine mahogany soon began appearing in newspapers and magazines. “The texture of Philippine mahogany,” asserted the author of a 1916 article in The Furniture Manufacturer and Artisan, “is practically identical with African mahogany, being, if anything, more easily worked than the latter.” However positive this pronouncement, the very same journal had reported a year earlier on its dismal performance in the marketplace, noting “the Philippine woods have not found much sale in the United States.”
Despite initial reservations, consumer reluctance gradually abated as the marketing campaign gained ground, leading to improved sales and wider acceptance. According to botanist Roy Maurice Myers, by the 1950s, American demand for Philippine mahogany eclipsed that of mahogany sourced elsewhere. In 1955, the combined total of American and African mahogany logs used by the US amounted to 72,555,000, far fewer than the 120 million logs imported from the Philippines. This demand translated into significant revenue for the lumbermen; in 1959, its free on board (FOB) value at Philippine ports was around $91 million, equivalent to about $1 billion today.
Like a real tree, the mythical Philippine mahogany needed time to grow.
When Sweet Turns Sour
One of the first companies to strip the trees of their local and botanical names was the American Insular Lumber Company (ILCO) based in Negros.
Before ILCO, the Iloilo Electric Company (IEC) had been logging in northern Negros, having been granted a license to operate in 1903. The very next year, according to a report from the Center for International Forestry Research, the colonial government awarded ILCO “a 20-year renewable concession to log approximately 300 square km of rich dipterocarp forest in Northern Negros in the Visayas,” and ILCO promptly took over the IEC’s operations.
ILCO was well received by the local hacenderos—sugar plantation owners—who were the dominant class in Negros after they pushed the Spaniards out in November 1898. According to Filomeno Aguilar, Jr, once the Europeans were gone, the hacenderos kowtowed to the Americans, offering the island as a protectorate in the hopes of securing favorable access to the lucrative US market for their sugar. This paved the way for ILCO to steamroll through the island.
Unfortunately for ILCO, the warm welcome soon turned cold.
In the early 1910s, the Philippine government opened an investigation of the company for possible fraud related to the sale of Philippine mahogany overseas. ILCO management sent an explanation to Dean Worcester, the Philippines’ Secretary of the Interior, stating that they sold woods “for just exactly what they are” and billed “them under their Philippine names only.” ILCO’s response, which appeared in the July 30, 1911 issue of The Cablenews-American, blamed “the wholesale men,” for any mix-ups, claiming that those men were the ones who offered these woods “as a substitute for mahogany.”
The authorities weren’t convinced, and the issue escalated when ILCO competitors brought the matter to the attention of the US government.
Pruning the Competition
Along with other lumber companies in the Philippines, ILCO soon found itself at the center of a prolonged legal squabble. Members of the Mahogany Association, dealers of other variants of mahogany, lodged a complaint with the Trade Commission in 1925, claiming unfair practices by Philippine-based lumber companies for selling Philippine lumber as “mahogany” despite their different botanical nature. A year later, the commission reached a decision, explains Lawrence Chalk, “against the use of the wood ‘mahogany’ for any timber not derived from trees of the family Meliaceae.”
Several men of prominence defended the accused lumber companies. During the 1926 Trade Commission hearings, Commissioner William Humphrey himself argued that the application of the name Philippine mahogany, while not botanically accurate, had commercial and popular precedence. “Why should we use,” he asked, “the restricted and scientific and highly technical name known by a few, and refuse to use the common, ordinary name, understood by all?”
Army Major Frederic Granville Munson also joined the chorus of Philippine mahogany defenders. In his court testimony, published in the November 18, 1930 issue of The Tribune, Munson highlighted the importance of Philippine mahogany in America’s rapid urbanization, stating that, “woods called ‘Philippine mahogany’ are unexcelled for beauty, strength, and durability among any of the woods of like class now offered in the market.” In fact, American contractors built several key structures with said material, including “some half dozen buildings in Seattle, especially the beautiful ‘Stimson Building.’”
The emphasis on utility and widespread familiarity soon reshaped regulatory policies in favor of the affected companies. The Trade Commission reopened the case in 1937 and deliberated for two decades, after which it vindicated the pragmatic approach. According to Myers, the Commission announced its intention to “prevent the use of the word mahogany as the name for wood other than genuine mahogany (Swietenia).” At first glance, this might appear as the last nail on Philippine mahogany’s coffin. Fortunately for the lumbermen and traders, this prohibition came with a special provision: “the non-mahogany Philippine woods Tanguile, Red Lauan, White Lauan, Tiaong, Almon, Mayapis and Bagtikan may be called ‘Philippine mahogany,’ owing to the usage of long standing.”
Convention had prevailed.
A Colony Within a Colony
While the legal battles continued abroad, ILCO was ramping up production at home. World War One-driven demand combined with fresh capital from New York “resulted in profitable operations until their equipment became run-down by 1921,” writes Filipino historian Karl Friedrik Poblador. Rather than immediately replacing deteriorating and damaged machines, ILCO sought to boost employee morale by heavily investing in its recreational infrastructure. Among the new installations were “a modern cinema and dance hall.” This investment in the social needs of the workers ultimately paid off, as production returns increased. By 1925, ILCO achieved the impressive feat of breaking “the world record for hardwood production,” according to Poblador.
But as it slowly grew into an economic powerhouse, ILCO also began to cast its darker shadow as an imperial surrogate for the US. With the backing of the colonial government, ILCO forced island inhabitants to endure the strict extension of its rules, demands, and influence. When the social distractions failed to quell labor discontent, ILCO was more than ready to flex its imperial muscles.
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ILCO, whose management was “exclusively American” according to Alfred McCoy, employed “feudalistic” techniques to suppress resentment among its workforce. For example, when tensions continued to escalate in October 1930, ILCO dispatched its own internal police to imprison “several workers in its company jail for up to 36 hours without food.”
The Insular Lumber Company was also an insular labor colony.
A Barren Legacy
The logic of capital drove ILCO to expand operations southward after depleting the northern forests of Negros. It extended its lumber production to the town of Hinobaan at the southwest end of the island in the 1970s. By the 1980s, they drove the southern forests to the brink of complete collapse, abandoning the island later in the same decade.
Despite their absence, the shadow of ILCO’s destructive legacy continues to haunt the island.
In 2023, floods struck the cities and towns of Negros island, affecting more than 15,000 people according to the Philippine News Agency. Then, in December 2024, a flash flood swept through the northern part of Negros. Local news outlets reported that the catastrophe affected some six thousand people.
An intact forest could have spared hundreds or even thousands from needless suffering. Like a giant umbrella, the towering canopies of aged dipterocarps would have prevented much of the rainfall from reaching the ground. In a study of forest hydrology, scientist Colin Clark states that “nearly one-third of the rainfall is intercepted and evaporated by the tree canopy.” This initial defense is complemented by the role played by the roots below, which would have created vast channels in the soil for rainfall to drain into. “Forest soils are about seven times as permeable to rainfall as are soils of the pasture-land,” concludes Clark.
The legal disputes over the use and misuse of “mahogany” highlight the complexities of international trade, but the intense focus on legalese effectively stripped the process of environmental concerns. ILCO decimated the diversity of Philippine trees, processing their timber and selling it with labels that obscured their genetics. Where once these trees stood in the island of Negros, sugarcane now dominates, all benefiting the hacenderos who welcomed the American lumbermen to clear the forests for later agricultural conversion.
In the end, the island hardly has any forests left at all.
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