Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel Piñol said Tuesday the Department of Agriculture 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 would seek the President’s approval of the Bantay Kagubatan program, a project with the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, to promote agro-forestry farming as a means to speed up reforestation and provide livelihood to poor families in rural areas.
He said he wanted the DA and DENR to jointly undertake the agro-forestry program to reforest a million hectares of land 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,” Piñol said.
He said the DA proposal included an agro-forestry program to be undertaken by private companies, including foreign-owned, if allowed by law, under lease contracts lasting up to 50 years or “even 100 years for sustainability.”
Under the proposal, the government would prioritize watershed areas for the agro-forestry farming program.
These include the Kalayaan watershed area, the Sierra Madre mountain ranges, and the Pampanga River, Panay watershed and the Mindanao River Basin watershed areas.
Piñol said the agro-forestry farming program would focus on tree species that could be harvestable in five to 10 years, as well as tree species for permanent forested areas.
He said the convergence project of the DA and DENR was presented to then Environment Secretary Regina Lopez.
He said he would present the program again to Secretary Roy Cimatu, who succeeded Lopez.
“Unlike the Finnish model, the Bantay Kagubatan is a stewardship program where poor rural families are assigned to guard an area of five hectares per family,” Piñol said.
“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 added.
Pinol said a family would get P2 as incentive for every growing seedling or a total of P5,000 a month if it attained a perfect survival rate. The family will
receive livelihood projects, like raising native pigs and free-range chicken.
The family will also be taught to plant second crops like black pepper, coffee, cacao, abaca or yam and other farming activities like mushroom culture.
