And at the slow pace of regreening the country’s forestlands, it would take 85 years to make the mountains lush again.
At present, P20,000 is needed to reforest a hectare, said Prof. Napoleon Vergara, chairman of the Green Tropics International (GTI), a private organization that conducts research and policy studies and consulting services.
He said more than six million hectares of declared forestlands are degraded and unproductive, yet an average of only 70,000 ha are being rehabilitated every year.
But all is not hopeless.
Reforestation activities can be fast-tracked if government policies on forestation are revised to stimulate the active participation of more private sectors in this endeavor, asserted Vergara, a retired professor at the UP Los Baños College of Forestry and Natural Resources (UPLB-CFNR).
His forum was the National Symposium on Forestation Research and Practices held here not long ago.
The symposium was organized by the UPLB-CFNR, GTI, Department of Environment and Natural Resources-Ecosystems Research and Development Bureau (DENR-ERDB), Department of Science and Technology-Philippine Council for Agriculture, Forestry and Natural Resources Research and Development (DOST-PCARRD) and DOST-Forest Products Research and Development Institute (FPRDI).
Vergara, who had also served as forestry expert of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (UN-FAO), pointed out that the government’s reforestation efforts could not suffice for the worst environmental scenario the country is facing.
On the other hand, the private sector has the interest and capacity to help the government in its reforestation efforts. However, he added, to increase the sectors’ participation, economic incentives must be provided and government policies must be revised.
Vergara noted that some incentives that greatly attract the private sectors are the security of land tenure, ownership of outputs by planters, and exemption from forest charges.
On the other hand, he pointed out that certain policies discourage the private sector. He cited regulatory obstacles in the following forestation activities: accessing forestland, plantation establishment, harvesting and transporting plantation products, processing wood from plantations, and marketing plantation products.
Examples of obstacles to land access are high application fees, costs of surveys and mappings and cost of protection against encroachers.
In plantation establishment, proving land ownership or lease becomes very difficult, technical assistance is inadequate, and financial assistance is usually poor.
Moreover, forest products cannot be harvested without prior forest inventory by the DENR, and harvested legs cannot be sold and transported without a certificate of origin (COO) from DENR.
On wood processing, rules make it difficult to buy and install processing mills. Installed mills are hard to operate owing to restrictions on sourcing raw materials and transport of processed products.
In the area of marketing, the government should provide guideline prices and grading rules to enable them to compete in the international market. Ironically, these are viewed as added regulatory obstacles to marketing.
These disincentives, asserted Vergara, strongly discourage the participation of the private sector in forestation.
He concluded: "As such, the government should take decisive steps to repeal or replace them with favorable policies and rules that will induce more tree farmers and forestry corporations to restore forests at little or no costs to government."