In early March 2024, Mr. Toshimichi Yoshinda, OISCA Director in charge of Global Sustainability Mission (GSM), went on a duty trip to Abra Province, Northern Luzon, the Philippines. Here is his summary field report on the site visit.
In 1991, Children’s Forest Program (CFP) was started in the Philippines including the Abra Province, and Sri Lanka. Presently, more than 5,000 schools are participating in CFP.
Many of these forests are small, less than one hectare in size, located on or adjacent to school grounds.
Abra Province is about a 10-hour drive to the north from Manila. The total population is about 250,000 in an area twice the size of Osaka Prefecture (population about 9 million). The mountainous region, with steep slopes covering 70% of the state, is like a “department store of disasters,” and there have been major earthquakes two years in a row. The area is a regular typhoon zone, and there is almost no district that is not at risk of windstorms and landslides. There is only one stable highway to the outside of the province. Manufacturing is extremely marginal and there are no major industries other than agriculture. Therefore, it has been likened to “poverty due to regional isolation,” ranked 74th in competitiveness among the country’s 81 provinces, and among the 10 poorest provinces. The forests on the steep slopes are literally degraded, with a series of bare mountains untouched by the province’s population, and some data seem to indicate that the forest cover in the Abra River Basin is 8%.
In this environment, we believe that the percentage of beneficiaries among the population is very high, even among small children, as 90 of the 160 schools in the province have implemented CFP. When I first visited Abra Province in 1997, and a group of Japanese volunteer students visited 26 schools implementing CFP in the area. Mr. Delfin Tesoro, Director, OISCA Agri Forestry Training Center, called for “Self-reliance]” to the villagers everywhere we went. This phrase continues to be the starting point for me.
In 2019, on my last business trip to the Philippines, which was my first in 16 years, I was taken to an activity site deep in the mountains without being told I was going to see anything. There, villagers from the area where CFP participating schools, under the guidance of Mr. Delfin, created 50 hectares of forest through “Self-reliance” and restored terraced rice paddies in two cropping seasons. This was the Community Forest Program. After returning to Japan, my doubts began to grow. I had heard that the afforestation record in Abra was 200 ha in about 30 years, but that cannot be true. This person would have done this method in other villages.
And with this thorough inspection, that question has been answered.
We learned that the “intention” was to connect the “points” of school forests with the “lines” of roadside trees, and to expand possible areas into “surfaces” at once with the same momentum as before.
I have never heard of a greening development that does not make fun of “just street trees,” but rather utilizes them as strategic “lines”. This time, I was surprised at the actual scale of the project, and it was hard to sleep every day. If I were in the same position, would I use a line? Usually, I think I should think of a point as a surface only where it is determined, in the form of a point. “Let’s plant more!” and Mr. Tesoro persuaded the government and villagers to plant more trees, even in the rocky mountains with a 30-degree slope along the road, more than 3 km long and up to the ridge. This time, I visited 18 “community forests” where lines are turned into surfaces.
Fifteen or twenty years after planting, village life changes: in the middle of the dry season, with virtually no rain since November, I saw rice paddy fields watered by a growing forest, plots of green vegetables growing even with wildfire alerts at their highest levels in recent years, and a magnificent spring-fed pool that has become a place of recreation…. I understood that an ideal Satoyama, mountainous area, and Super Community Forest had been created in Abra through self-help efforts.
Mr. Tesoro really “just wanted to plant”. The gemelina he planted at that time is a fast-growing tree that is easy to collect seeds and grow, and is very resistant to wilderness and wildfire. Moreover, it is a deciduous tree, so it is also a fertilizer tree. Seedlings can be produced in countless numbers. With the volunteer spirit of the villagers, I believe they could have planted endless numbers of trees. The roads are much better now, but they must have been very bad in the past. It must have been very difficult to plant in the rainy season, and it must have been very hard to get there and back.
This was my fourth trip to Abra, and the main purpose was to accompany three executives of the Japanese Federation of Chemical Workers’ Union, a special corporate member that has long supported CFP and the Miyagi coastal forest restoration project. I also took advantage of this opportunity to check the needs of the site to my satisfaction.
As a summary, we understood that in the satoyama zone, where only a few plains and gentle slopes are located, greening of more than 500 hectares has been implemented and largely completed in 30 years. The north bank of the Abra River (La Paz and other towns), which has not been able to meet the needs of its residents due to poor accessibility, will be able to better meet their needs now that a new bridge is to be completed. This time, I thought there would be needs for replanting in about 15 schools, but it was completed before and after the Covid-19 pandemic.
And as the culmination of his life, Mr. Delfin is about to take on the challenge of “100 hectares of bald mountain afforestation” as positioned by the All Abra Children’s Forest Program. His spirit of enthusiasm and motivation will not change. However, from the government’s point of view, it is only a place like this that can be entrusted to an NGO, and from the history of OISCA. Also, there is no soil here; it is a rocky mountain. Mr. Delfin says:
“But this is an important place near irrigation water. The government entrusted it to us. This is the pride of OISCA”. I know what he means when he says this is pride. I think I was raised by Mr. Delfin. If I had not met him, I would not have conceived of the Natori Coastal Forest Restoration Project. Now it is my job to respond to that motivation and ability.
The generation that experienced 40 years of greening OISCA is also reaching its culmination. First and foremost, we would like to invest resources in motivated and capable sites in each country and encourage them to produce results. And in parallel, we need to train the next generation to follow the veterans in each country, including Mr. Delfin.