By Estanislao Albano, Jr.
The previous administration declared the National Greening Program (NGP), the most massive government reforestation program so far, a resounding success prompting the extension thereof until 2028. The decision of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) to continue devoting the lion’s share of its budget to the program – P7.1B or 26 percent of its P27.1B 2018 budget and P5.15B in the proposed 2019 budget – means that the current regime also believes in the success of the program.
Since normally, people who accomplish a feat are eager to show the same to others including the critics, we cannot understand the DENR’s determined refusal to have the program scrutinized.
On March 17, 2018, the Kalinga Anti-pollution Action Group (KAPAG) along with fellow Kalinga civil society organizations (CSOs) Tabuk Multi-purpose Cooperative, Kalinga and Apayao Religious Sector Association and Episcopal Diocese of Northern Luzon submitted to Secretary Roy Cimatu their report on the inspection of some 27 NGP sites in the provinces of Benguet, Ifugao, Mt. Province, Apayao and Kalinga in 2016 showing that the DENR-Cordillera is bloating its survival rates and requesting that samplings also be made in other regions to find out if what we found in the Cordillera are isolated or not.
While the letter was acknowledged electronically, we still have to receive a response after more than four months.
What we did receive sometime in July was a letter from Undersecretary and Chief of Staff Rodolfo Garcia informing us of the action his office had taken on the referral of Senator Loren Legarda of our request to her to initiate an inquiry into the NGP on the basis of the monitoring report. Garcia wrote that he referred the communication to the offices of the Assistant Secretary on Anti-corruption and Forest Management Bureau (FMB).The subject of the memorandum is “Request for Investigation of NGP Implementation in Kalinga.”
It appears that Garcia failed to read the referred request properly. In fact, we also note that his letter and memorandum are at odds with each other. The letter said that our letter was “requesting for an investigation on the alleged bloated/fabricated results of the survival rate of the NGP implementation in the Cordillera Region” but the memorandum is about a “Request for Investigation of NGP Implementation in Kalinga.” In defense of the clarity of our letter, the office of Senator Legarda deemed it appropriate to indorse it to the office of Senator Cynthia Villar, the chairman of the Committee on Environment and Natural Resources.
At any rate, on July 17, 2018, KAPAG wrote Garcia to clarify the scope of the investigation we requested citing the contents of our letters to Legarda and Cimatu and expressing our belief the inspection of at least 10 randomly picked NGP sites planted in first three years of the program per region in at least five randomly picked regions could already indicate if what is happening in the Cordillera is isolated or not. We quoted from our March 17, 2018 letter to Secretary Cimatu as follows: “We want to clarify that our report is not about the DENR-CAR alone. While the evidences were gathered in the Cordillera, the intent of the report is to pry open the eyes and consciousness of the national leadership to what is going on in the implementation of the multi-billion program nationwide. We hold that only when similar samplings are done in other regions and these yield negative results can we conclude that what we found in the Cordillera are isolated. We are willing to participate in the conduct of such additional inspections.”
We cannot really reconcile the determined effort of the DENR to frustrate our request for investigation of the NGP to the point of pretending they do not know how to read with the agency’s glowing reports on the output of the program. We could only surmise that all is not well in the implementation of the NGP and the DENR does not want the world to find out.**
