FEAST OF THE FOREST

A report from the Philippines on a unique tree-planting festival.

Palawan, the westernmost province of the Philippines, is considered the country’s last ecological frontier. Up until the end of World War II, the island was very sparsely populated and was home to dry, monsoonal forests containing beautiful and durable hardwoods such as Narra (Pterocarpus indictus) and Ipil (Intsia bijuga). These woods, generally used for furniture manufacture, are highly valued on both the local and export market. The most accessible regions, such as the coast, were logged in the early 20th century and, in recent decades there was vigorous logging of remote areas until commercial logging was made illegal in 1994.

A sustained influx of mainly farmers and loggers began in 1948, increasing the population from 56,000 to 489,000 by 1995 and this island of immigrants now contains a complex mix of peoples from many other regions of the Philippines who have brought with them a variety of cultures, languages and livelihood strategies. Logging and slash and burn land clearance by migrant farmers has resulted in much of the island’s original forest landscape being transformed into agricultural land. A third of it was lost between 1976 and 1992.

By the early 1990s deforestation was running at the rate of 11 hectares a day, causing serious problems with the watersheds. As a result, the inhabitants of Puerto Princesa, the island’s capital city, which was established as late as 1970, were enduring drought during the summer months. Elsewhere in Palawan, other communities were also experiencing flash flooding during the monsoon season – potentially a very dangerous problem.

In order to instil environmental awareness in the minds of the people and, more urgently, to reforest the city’s watershed, a local project under the national government initiated a festival they called ‘Feast of the Forest’ (Pista y ang Kageban) to be held annually in June, the start of Palawan’s rainy season.

 In 1991, 2,500 people attended the first Pista; this rose to 7,500 the following year and to 30,000 people the year after that. At that time new, pro-environment government officials took office and in 1994, the festival spread province-wide with additional smaller tree-planting festivals being held simultaneously in other Palawan municipalities. As a result, nearly 250 hectares of forest in total have now been planted with a seedling survival rate of 70-80%.

By now the Pista has become a huge event, involving tens of thousands of people, as I witnessed at first-hand this year. Before the sun rose, thousands of Puerto Princesans could be seen leaving their houses and making their way through the streets toward the trucks waiting to take them to the festival. As one participant told me: ‘It’s really a holiday because everybody’s here. The whole town stops just for Pista and that reflects the consciousness of the people.’

When we arrived at the watershed of the River Irawan, the atmosphere at the planting site was one of excitement and celebration. Despite the rain, more than two hundred people had camped out there the night before and trucks carrying volunteers from the city had been arriving there since 4:30 that morning. All were required to plant as many seedlings as they could on the muddy slopes before joined the musical and other festivities on another part of the festival site. As the day went on, helicopters could be heard overhead, on their way to scatter seeds on the steeper, more inaccessible areas of the hillside.

This year around 85,000 seedlings were successfully planted on 32 hectares of land – the most ever in one year. Thanks to this tree planting, the city’s water supply is now relatively stable even though consumption in Puerto has increased significantly in the last ten years. The people of Puerto Princesa are now more conscious of the forest which surrounds the city as, having planted it, they feel responsible for its continued growth. ‘It is a matter of the city tying itself with nature’, one volunteer told me. ‘I think this kind of festival should be replicated all over the Philippines.’

This article was originally published in Tree News, the magazine of the Tree Council (UK) and the world's first news-stand magazine on Trees.

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