Success Stories Brighten Asia’s Bleak Forestry Picture

Success Stories Brighten Asia’s Bleak  Forestry Picture

By Dr. Michael A. Bengwayan

Although the record of reforestation is dismal in the Asia Pacific region is dismal, several success stories in the Philippines,  South Korea, India and China have kindled new hope among environmentalists and tree growers.

The reason is not hard to find. Many of the projects feature innovative approaches that may find wide use in the world, particularly in developing nations.

In reforestation, South Korea has emerged a model. In just twenty years from 1980 to 2000, the Korean countryside has been transformed to thick forests.

Since 1970, South Korea was a barren, denuded country plagued by soil erosion Its hillsides were eroded, and the land lost  most of its water retention capacity. But as of 1977, some  643,000 hectares—roughly half the size of area planted to rice nationwide—had been planted to fast growing trees. The area reforested doubled by 1989.

How? The government created the Korea Forest Service in 1967 and after legal and institutional preparations, the KFS initiated the 10-year forest rehabilitation plan starting in 1973. The first national forest plan, which was launched in 1973, aimed to restore denuded forest, so the government encouraged the public to plant fast-growing trees, declaring a nationwide tree planting period from March 21-April 20 every year. This sparked massive and intensive tree planting.

The success is due primarily due to the organization of federally-linked village forestry associations and the direct participation of villagers in reforestation efforts.

Through the association composed of representatives of each of its households, each participating village plants, tends, and harvests the woodlots without pay.

Harvested  wood is distributed among households and the proceeds from any marketable surplus are used to support other community development projects. The program’s primary aim was to bring back the forests to stabilize land and water supply, and the secondary aim, to provide enough firewood to satisfy the fuel needs of all rural communities. 

The economic gains were obvious to the villagers: the switch back to local wood supplies means that they can now pocket the 15 percent of their income that they were forced to spend on local coal when firewood became scarce.

The community forestry success story in Gujarat, Western India also bears telling. The state forestry began to observe that existing forest reserves, however skillfully managed, could not satisfy the local firewood needs. In 1970, Gujarat launched a village woodlot forestation program, planting trees in roadside strips, irrigation canal banks, and other state-owned lands. The idea in each case was to let nearby community take responsibility for managing the woodlots.

The United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) evaluated the program and noted:”The roadside and canal bank plantations did not involve public participation to a degree that social forestry could be achieved but nevertheless, a marked critical psychological turning point was achieved when, seeing thousands of strands of trees arise on what have been desolate grounds, some two million  people trooped to the state government begging to be involved in the tree planting program.”

In just nine years from 1979-1989, some 17,000 kilometers of Gujarat’s roadway and canals combined were lined  with approximately 20 million trees, yearly, four to five million trees were added.

Eventually, this forestry model became a people's program. Under this, the state embarked upon an ambitious mission of organising and motivating more people to take up tree plantation on  other lands like Panchayat lands, wastelands, , farmlands school and college compounds and other government lands.

The results of the program were encouraging, and were appreciated internationally. After the success of the initial efforts, the State was encouraged to formulate a project extending to all the districts. In the last 10 years or so, the project has been funded by the state and consequently Gujarat has switched from being a food deficit to a food surplus state today. As a pioneer in the social forestry sector, the success of Gujarat has been globally acclaimed.

China’s experience may be the most mind-boggling. Through mobilization of massive human labor, its reforestation rate has been increasing from five percent in 1960 to 12.5 percent in 1980. Reforestation and afforestation of wastelands, including deserts are ongoing not only to increase forestland but  to prevent desertification, reduce flooding , erosion and siltation and increase lumber supply and fuelwood in the rural areas.

In 1978, China introduced the Natural Forest Conservation Program, a logging ban to help protect against erosion and rapid runoff. It  followed this with two national programs. One was the Grain to Green program, which is basically to reconvert agricultural fields in steep slopes into forests. And the other is the natural forest conservation program which is, in a sense, a logging ban to prevent deforestation and also to increase the aerial forests.

China is regreening  the vast Kubuqi desert   located in Hangjin Qi, within the Ordos City prefecture in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, China,  through a Great Green Wall program, designed to reverse decades of desertification.  It  is quickly turning back the spread of desert by planting fast-growing trees, such as aspen, that would rapidly establish deep webs of soil-stabilizing roots and form a shady canopy.

China spends more than 100 billion US dollars for its reforestation programs.

In the Philippines, where through the past years forest depletion was brought about by  overexploitation, and mismanaged forest policies, noble reforestation efforts are being spearheaded by private foundations and non-government organizations (NGOs).

One effort by the Aboitiz Foundation in Mindanao reforested 2,000 hectares with two million trees in partnership with the indigenous peoples Matigsalog Lumads in the rebel-infested badlands of Marilog, in Davao del Sur where the Lumads are provided agroforestry skills for livelihood in exchange  for planting denuded forest lands.

North of the Philippines in the island of Luzon, the Cordillera Ecological Center raises  and plants thousands of trees yearly, mostly pine trees, and spearheads forestation effort with hundreds of volunteers with volunteer groups like A Tree A Day (ATAD).

Another is the Haribon-led Road to 2020 ROAD  (Rainforestation Organizations and Advocates), which started in 2005,  an environmental movement to restore Philippine rainforests using native tree species such narra, apitong, lauan and many others and to sustain provision of ecological goods and services by year 2020 through an informed and engaged people. It provides an opportunity for everyone to come together and help bring back our natural forests.

The Philippine government has exerted efforts in bringing back forests in its fast balding hinterlands. But nationally-led forestation programs like the  1990 Asian Development Bank (ADB)- funded National Contract Reforestation Program and the  2002-National Greening Program (NGP) were  stained with corruption and failure.

This is a far cry from earlier forestation efforts by the Philippine government like the Program for Ecosystem Management that met success  from 1970 to 1978.

Today, the rate of deforestation in the Philippines still outpaces the rate of forestation and there exists a backlog of some five million hectares of open and understocked forestland in the country.

But one thing is certain in the experiences of the four countries. Local peoples, private institutions, companies, schools are joining the fray in tree planting.

This trend in forestation is made more urgent by international calls to reduce carbon footprint as no one can underemphasize the value of forests as source of oxygen,  carbon dioxide sink and main factor in global cooling rather than just a natural resource for lumber or firewood.

The forest is man’s  primeval source of almost everything, the benefits equally crucial but often intangible, such that  not many know that the only way to keep it with mankind starts with a simple treeplanting.

There is No Father’s Day in the Land Where Sugar is Bitter

There is No Father’s Day in the Land Where Sugar is Bitter

By MICHAEL A. BENGWAYAN

(A reprint from the defunct Philippine Post)

Tarlac, Tarlac, Philippines (June 23, 2010) – While the world  celebrated Father’s Day last June 17th,  a secular holiday honoring and commemorating fathers  worldwide,  Noel Biktas here is unmindful and ignorant about it.

So are thousands more in the country like him.

“Father’s Day, what?”, he  gruffly retorted when asked if he knew about it.

It is not difficult to understand him. Sun-burnt at 56 summers, he  does one of the country’s most difficult and lowly paid jobs ten hours a day. One of the thousands of  “sacadas” (sugar cane plantation worker)  slaving in endless lands of the few rich billionaires in the country, he earns  less than two dollars a day.

He and his kind   plod through itchy and rough cane fields wielding three feet machetes or bolos through steaming heat, dirt  and sweat to cut cane for sugar that is exported to the USA, Europe and Japan . He retires only when darkness overpowers daylight to  feast on a bowl of rice and small dried fish left by his family of six who sleeps on  a rough coconut timber as floor, covered by a sack. A place they call home.

Barely visible a mile  away is an opulent mansion towering over the far-reaching expanse of canefields costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.  The house of Noel’s landlord..

Sacadas like Noel have toiled for four generations on their landlords’ hacienda.. His grandfather, father and two sons are sacadas like him. “My children’s children will be like me, there is no place else to go,” he says with a defeated far-away look.

Indeed, the thousands of fathers working as sacadas in the Philippines, are finding it difficult to get out of their cycle of poverty.

Most sacadas live in darkness. They are nailed to the earth.

The plight of the Sacadas in the Philippines is best exemplified by those living in the island of  Negros Occidental.  They are underpaid, ill-treated,  and deprived of every basic human rights, including members of their families,  the National Federation of Sugar Workers (NFSW) in the Philippines say..

“Many starve and remain at the mercy of their patriarchs—the landowners—who will decide what to pay them, how much, when and what they and their family members can and cannot do”, it added.

NFSW estimates there are more than 500,000 sacadas in the Philippines. This does not include fathers’ sons and even wives and daughters enslaved by the inhuman backbreaking labor of sugar plantations.

Sacadas are the Philippine’s  living proof that colonial-period migrant labor in the Philippines persists in the “new millennium.” The ordinary sacada is the oppressed worker, migrant, and peasant twice over. Receiving abysmally-low wages and denied benefits, many of the sacadas hail from the Visayas islands , where many hacienda landowning families are found,  Irish priest  Fr. Niall O’Brien of the Negros Diocese says after working in the province for 40 years.

The tragedy experienced by sacadas is nowhere more real than in November 2004 when  soldiers and policemen attacked and killed more than a dozen sacadas and arrested more than a hundred others sacadas who were protesting their low pay and inhuman treatment. The hacienda they worked at is owned by the family of Corazon C. Aquino, former president of the Philippines.

The harsh and  difficult working and living conditions of the sacada and his family is worsened by people contracting sacadas to work in haciendas. Fr. Arnesio Jesena, S. J. Of the Ateneo de Manilka University lived with sacadas in at least ten areas in the Philippines says “Sacadas and their families are helpless when under contractors because they cannot dictate their own terms. They are often abused by these contracxtors.”

He had these to say:

“When I lived with the sacadas like a sacada, here were 200 of us — men, women, and children staying in two adjoining cuartels.

There was not a single toilet.

There was only one source of water — an old pump. Here everyone did his or her washing, bathing, laundering. We had no blankets, no mosquito nets.

For food, three times a day we were served rice — the cheapest, driest, coarsest, most unappetizing I have ever tasted. Many of the grains were unhusked, and there were pieces of gravel to be found among the grains of rice. We were also given fish — small, dry fish (pinamalhan nga sapsap). Rough rice and dry fish, that was all. No liquid, no vegetables, a diet which gave no delight and no strength.

Fr. Jesena’s tale is  written a book called “The Sacadas of Sugarland”.

During the term of Pres. Corry Aquino, the Comprehensive Agrarian reform Program  (CARP) was launched with the intention of providing land to the landless like the sacadas. But it met little success mainly because the landowners were the politicians themselves and never pushed the national law with will. Only a handful politician-landowners willingly parted from their lands.

Now 20 years after, the CARP program will end. But to the sacadas and their families, the CARP was just a story in the wind, blown away like their fading hopes  of escaping poverty that is slowly breaking their very souls. /30

Reverencing Earth …michael a. bengwayan

Reverencing  Earth

…michael a. bengwayan

I remember the first time I saw the Giant’s Causeway in Antrim,  Northern Ireland.  I had seen pictures of it but there was no preparation for the overpowering presence of being there, walking toward the unfenced rim, seeing the ocean through giant stairways carved from solid basalt rock. I could see after an involuntary gasp at the vastness of the ocean atop a throne of stones. I was struck by the stillness of the whole panorama.  I could not say anything because there was nothing to say. It seemed my words were swallowed up by the enormous chasm in front of me.

The proper response was not words but silence. I felt, dumb, so primordial. I felt the same reverence I  felt when I was in the rainforests of Kalimantan, Indonesia  Or in the old Resurrection Church in Baguio where  I served in as a sextant when I was a boy. The Giant’s Causeway evokes that sort of reverence. It is a place of tremendous majesty. To throw a stone over the wide expanse even seemed like a desecration.

This kind of reverence people spontaneously feel is the attitude we need to cultivate toward the entire Earth. Eco-spirituality honors the Earth. We walk the Earth with humility and reverence, not with arrogant air of an insensitive landlord. We do not worship the air as divine but respect it as a revelation of our Lord. To reverence the Earth is to respect the artistry of our Creator, the Divine Artist.

Every feature of the global landscape has a value even though we may not be able to identify that value or explain its role in the total ecosystem. It took millions of years for the ocean to carve the Giant Stairway, and every feature of the Earth’s surface is the result of similar geological processes. The antiquity and functional success of these planetary systems demand reverence.

Our physical environment forms us in obvious as well as subtle ways. We are shaped by the landscape and imbued by the spirit of the place where we live. It could be said that the Earth gave birth to us and conditions the way we live and support ourselves. It has all the maternal qualities of fruitfulness, guidance, benefiscence.

It is because the Earth shapes and nurtures us that the Earth is our Mother. Mother Earth deserves a loving reverence similar to what we show our human mothers.

Lord, give me a sunbeam ....michael a. bengwayan...

Lord, give me a sunbeam
....michael a. bengwayan...

This is a sunbeam in my forest farm Habitat. One of the reasons I wake up early is to watch a sunbeam. I love sunbeams. They prompt me to think of heaven. They’re lighted pathways spanning heaven and earth.

I like to watch the sun struggling to break through, creep under the forest floor, brighten the leaves of trees, make sparkle the dew and bring life to the world.

It’s because as a human, a creation, I yearn for the transcendent. I instinctively know there is more to life than drinking coffee, tending my garden or planting trees. It’s not that the day-to-day details of life are unimportant, they are. God has anointed them as part of what it means to be human on a daily basis. Still, we know there’s more, and, for me, sunbeams remind me that there’s more, far more.

It’s good, while we’re living the details of each day, to maintain a heavenly perspective, an eternal view. Like the bee that flies away from its hive to return over and over again, to make sure the nectar of flowers reach the honeycomb, so we have a Heavenly Father who gives us His full attention. We can know we are part of His divine plans and that we have His mighty help. We can pray the psalmist’s prayer, “Keep me as the apple of your eye; hide me in the shadow of your wings.” (Psalm 17:8)

While we’re here on earth we’re to embrace all that God has for us to do. But in the doing of it we’re to never lose sight of heaven’s perspective. Sunbeams are just one way God reminds me of this! “The heavens proclaim his righteousness, and all peoples see his glory.” (Psalm 97:6)