By Estanislao Albano, Jr.
With no adverse pronouncements from President Rodrigo Duterte and Environment Secretaries Roy Cimatu and Gina Lopez regarding the National Greening Program (NGP), the so-called banner environmental program of the Aquino Administration appears to have changed hands lock, stock and barrel. This unquestioning acceptance of the NGP by the Duterte Administration is also evident in the post in the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) website announcing that under the Enhanced National Greening Program (ENGP), the replacement of the NGP, it is targeting to reforest some 1.2M hectares during its watch.
That means that the Duterte Administration also believes the fairy tale of the past administration’s environmental officials that the survival rate of the seedlings planted since the program started in 2011 stood at an unbelievable 82 percent in 2015. To give the Duterte Administration a clue, retired prosecutor Arthur Kub-ao, a genuine tree lover and experienced tree grower whose tree farm at Taniok, New Tanglag, Tabuk City, Kalinga is a beauty to behold, scoffs at the survival rating claims of the DENR saying that through the years of closely and painstakingly attending to his tree plants, he has never attained that high survival rate what with the overwhelming grass, the need for water during summer, the high cost of labor and other factors.
It may also interest President Duterte and DENR Secretary Roy Cimatu that the DENR gave the 115-hectare site of the Cawagayan Mapaco Forestland Management Association in Cawagayan, Pinukpuk, Kalinga a survival rating of 86.31 in its March 22, 2016 validation but when Kub-ao and I inspected the site sometime in September 2016, we could count the trees with the fingers of our left hands and subsequently estimated the survival rate of only 10 percent.
In view hereof, I am suggesting that the Duterte Administration subject the claimed success of the NGP to scrutiny to know the real status thereof. Previous presidents made the error of fully entrusting reforestation programs to their Environment Secretaries who in turn swallowed the reports of their underlings hook, line and sinker and as a result, it is good if five percent of the seedlings planted since the time of President Corazon Aquino, when the government started reforesting in earnest, have grown into trees.
The best way to determine if the rosy reports on the NGP are backed up by trees on the ground is for the President himself or someone who could be trusted to tell him the whole truth make surprise visits to NGP sites otherwise the Duterte Administration would be left holding the bag created by the bright boys in the DENR during the previous administration.
I must caution the President or his trusted representative not to let the DENR people chose the sites they will visit because the DENR is good at making guided tours of their reforestation sites. The sites should be randomly chosen and the process of selection free of any influence from the DENR otherwise the effort to find the truth about the NGP would be frustrated.
The President should be forewarned that if he leaves the regreening program solely to DENR people, the moment the government allots funds for the planting of trees, it might as well kiss such funds goodbye. This happened with his predecessors and it will happen to him if he does not personally prove the veracity of the reports coming from the DENR. No President since Cory had done that so for all the billions of reforestation funds borrowed from lending institutions, little progress in regreening the countryside has been made until now.
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