Atienza urges audit of forestry-lease contracts

Written by Jonathan L. Mayuga / Correspondent

Tuesday, 22 December 2009 20:25

ENVIRONMENT Secretary Lito Atienza has ordered the creation of an independent body to audit the performances of awardees of forestry-lease contracts. Atienza has allocated P8 million for the purpose and has tapped civil-society groups and academe to help weed out what he describes as nonperforming awardees. There are around 1,936 lease contracts covering 2.45 million hectares of the country’s forestlands. Atienza wants the independent body to identify those awardees whose performances do not meet the criteria set in their lease contracts. “The initiative will focus on optimizing the full-potential of the country’s forestry resources to achieve self-sufficiency at the local  and national levels in a more participatory and people-oriented approach,” Atienza said. The chief of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) noted that the country’s wood requirement, which averages around 1.9 million cubic meters annually, would be sufficiently met if  even half of the awarded areas are developed to their full potential. According to the Forestry Master Plan, the country needs at least 550,000 hectares of timber plantations to achieve self-sufficiency for its yearly wood supply, with a potential to create 13,000 jobs in the countryside. Last Nov. 27, Atienza approved a proposal submitted by Forest Management Bureau director Marlo Mendoza seeking the formation of an independent audit team whose members will come from “qualified and credible party outside of the DENR like nongovernment organizations or state colleges and universities offering environmental science and forestry.” In the proposal, Mendoza said that while assessing the performance of the tenure holders is being done by the DENR, the need for a “high-level of credibility of the assessment process” should be conducted by “a qualified and capable third party,” noting that “in some cases” performance evaluation being done by the DENR is “on an irregular basis.” Mendoza cited the current situation in the implementation of the 1,783 and 153 lease contracts granted under the Community-Based Forest Management Program (CBFM) and the Integrated Forest Management Agreements (IFMAs), respectively. IFMAs, awarded to cooperatives and corporations, cover some 832,597 hectares of the country’s residual forest areas, while CBFM is awarded to upland communities covering a total of 1.6 million hectares. In particular, Mendoza observed that the immediate focus of the still-to-be-created auditing team be given to IFMA holders, saying that “the current IFMA holders in the country are not regularly monitored.” Through IFMAs, the private sector is awarded up to 40,000 hectares of forest areas under a production-sharing scheme between the private sector and the government. IFMA holders are given the exclusive right for 25 years (renewable for another 25 years) to manage  and utilize their concession areas following specific management measures cited in their DENR-approved Comprehensive Development and Management Plan (CDMP). “There are even IFMA holders who don’t even have an approved management plan [CDMP], which is required to be prepared by the holder within one year after the approval of the lease contract,” Mendoza stressed. The IFMA scheme is the result of the 1987 Constitution which gave way to the principle of decentralization and recognition of people’s participation in resource development. Unlike the old “Timber License Agreement” system whose concession areas included old-growth forests, all timber production under IFMA is now limited within residual forests in accord with the national policy banning all logging in old-growth forests.