Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel F. Piñol said that the Department of Agriculture (DA) will propose to President Rodrigo Duterte the leasing of government land, including watershed areas, to private companies that will engage in agro-forestry and reforestation projects.
Piñol said he will seek the President’s approval of the Bantay Kagubatan program, a convergence project with the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), to promote agro-forestry farming as a means to speed up reforestation and as a means of livelihood for poor families in rural areas.
The DA Secretary said his renewed push for the Bantay Kagubatan program comes as a result of his trip last week to Finland, where agro-forestry farming accounts for 20% of the gross domestic product and provides livelihood to thousands of Finnish families while keeping Finland one of the heavily-forested countries in the world.
He said he will propose that the agro-forestry program be a joint project of the DA and the DENR to plant a million hectares of land with trees within three to five years.
“It is time for us to be ambitious (in reforesting our lands) … Every time I travel and ride a helicopter and see our denuded mountains, I get scared,” Secretary Piñol said.
He said the DA will propose to the President that the agro-forestry program be undertaken also by private companies, including foreign-owned if allowed under the law, under lease contracts lasting up to 50 years “even 100 years for sustainability.
Piñol said the DA is proposing that the National Government prioritize watershed areas for the agro-forestry farming program, to include the Kalayaan watershed area, the Sierra Madre mountain ranges, the Pampanga River watershed area, the Panay watershed area, and the Mindanao Rver Basin watershed area.
He said the DA proposes that the agro-forestry farming program focus on tree species that could easily be harvestable in five to 10 years, and a permanent tree specie for permanent forested areas.
In a Facebook post, the DA Secretary noted that as a Convergence Project of the DA and the DENR, he presented to then DENR Secretary Regina Lopez the Bantay Kagubatan program. He said he will present the program again to newly-appointed DENR Secretary Roy Cimatu as soon as possible.
“Unlike the Finnish model, the Bantay Kagubatan is a stewardship program where poor rural families are assigned to guard an area of 5-hectares per family,” Piñol noted.
Under Bantay Kagubatan, the National Government would engage poor families in the targeted lands to plant at least 500 tree seedlings of both harvestable and indigenous tree species, he said.
For every growing seedling, a family would get an incentive of P2 or a total of P5,000 a month if it attains a perfect survival rate for all 500 tree seedlings planted. In addition, the family will be given livelihood projects like native pig raising and free range chicken raising.
The family will also be taught to plant second crops like black pepper, coffee, cacao, abaca or yam and taught other farming activities like mushroom culture. ### (DA-OSEC)
