By Estanislao Albano, Jr.
(NOTE: This is my answer to the letter of National Greening Program National Coordinator Ricardo Calderon published in the August 16, 2016 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer which the paper unfortunately did not publish.)
After former Environment Secretary Ramon Jesus Paje choose to keep silent on my dare (“An environmental agency without environmentalists,” (Philippine Daily Inquirer Opinion, 7/25/16) that he sticks his name to the 80 percent survival rate of the National Greening Program (NGP) he claimed in the aftermath of the finding of the Commission on Audit that the program is a failure, I have some doubts that DENR people believe in the NGP success story.
With Forest Management Bureau Director and NGP National Coordinator Ricardo Calderon now publicly repeating the same claim of success (“Environment dep’t explains greening program ‘in detail,’” Philippine Daily Inquirer Opinion, 8/16/16), I direct the same challenge at him. If an independent audit conducted by a credible entity will expose that the current 83 percent survival rate claimed by his office is bloated, he should take personal responsibility for the difference.
There is no reason Calderon could not call the dare because, according to his letter, one of the safety nets of the NGP is the notarization of the regional reports of the regular 100 percent monitoring of the plantations. This policy was introduced by Paje in late 2011 to ensure the veracity of accomplishment reports. As far I am informed, up until now, not one regional director has been accused of falsifying his accomplishment report which means Calderon believes in the accuracy of the said documents.
In the event that just like Paje, Calderon refuses to defend the success story of the NGP, I throw the dare next to the regional directors. If a full audit of the sites in their respective regions come up short of their claimed survival rate, they will have to answer for the deficit. They should have no qualms in calling my challenge because they themselves made the reports under oath.
Now if the regional directors also do not take the challenge and the success story of the NGP becomes an orphan, it is incumbent upon Secretary Regina Lopez to order a nationwide tree by tree count to determine how much of the 1.45M hectares claimed by Calderon really contains trees and seedlings. If she does not do this, she and the current administration would automatically become the keeper and defender of a possibly bloated reforestation statistics which misleads the public into believing that our forest has expanded by so much under the NGP when it is only by this much.
It is only after it learns the full truth about the P7B-worth NGP that this administration could properly redirect if warranted the government’s reforestation program. An NGP success story that is not fully supported by real trees makes it impossible to make informed and sound decisions on how to better regreen the country. Only when we know the real score could we answer questions such as if we are getting our money’s worth in terms of trees under the current reforestation system and if regreening could be cheaper and have better results if carried out by the private sector with minimal or no DENR involvement.
Finally, regarding the conduct of an independent third party audit by the National Economic and Development Authority’s Philippine Institute for Development Studies mentioned by Calderon, for the sake of transparency, the DENR should release the results. It is important for the public to see how the results compare with that of the annual in-house 100-percent monitoring.**
