AS the rainy season sets in next month, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) is gearing up for massive tree-planting activities in various parts of the country under the National Greening Program (NGP), the country’s top forestry official said.
Ricardo Calderon, director of the DENR’S Forest Management Bureau (FMB), said starting in June or July, planting of timber and fuel wood will be carried out simultaneously by the DENR’s NGP partners, which include people’s organizations and community-based organizations under the Community-Based Forest Management (CBFM) program, local government units (LGUs) and the private sector.
All year, forestry officials produce planting materials, but tree-planting activities are implemented during the rainy season to ensure higher survival rate.
This year’s target is to cover a total of 252,000 hectares in 5,000 NGP sites by the end of year to achieve the country’s overall target under the NGP covering 1.5 million hectares by 2016.
But the official is confident of overshooting the overall greening target by at least 100,000 hectares to conclude the NGP, considering the current accomplishment under the NGP is around 1.35 hectares as of December 2015.
Next year, by virtue of Executive Order 193, around 5,000 government contracts for planting and maintaining the NGP sites will be signed in the ensuing days. At an average of 50 members per people’s organization that will be awarded NGP contracts, the official said around 250,000 green jobs will be created.
“This year we are not planting high-value crops and fruit trees. What we will plant are trees for timber and fuel wood because that is what we need to plant at the moment. Next year we will be going back to planting high-value crops and fruit trees,” Calderon, the national coordinator of the NGP, told the BusinessMirror in an interview on Tuesday.
Calderon added that for every hectare, the target is planting 1,600 trees. The requirement is to produce more than 403 million trees to achieve its 2016 target.
The cost per hectare this year was increased by the DENR to P23,000 compared to the previous year’s cost of P18,000.
“We increased the cost per hectare at P8 per tree from P18,000 to P23,000,” Calderon said.
The NGP partners awarded the contracts will have to produce the planting materials, which, he said, could be produced at a price of as low as P3 per tree.
“Our planting materials, more or less, is short by 35 million. Short means the trees we have in our nurseries are not yet ‘plantable,” he said.
In the next few months, planting materials in the nurseries will be sufficient to cover the year’s target, he said.
Calderon said planting materials need to be old enough to survive upon transfer from nurseries to NGP sites to ensure a high survival rate.
The DENR hopes to surpass its target of an 80-percent survival rate. But Calderon said that, as part of the contract with NGP partners, the DENR requires implementing agencies to replace all the trees that die.
Calderon said the DENR now has five mechanized tree nurseries on top of 27 clonal nurseries. So far, the five regular tree nurseries have produced 12 million planting materials. The DENR, he said, is currently “calibrating” the production capacity of the regular-tree nurseries to produce the target of 1 million trees a day.
Calderon said six more mechanized tree nurseries are ongoing construction to ensure the supply of planting materials for future reforestation efforts.