Government’s 2013-2016 National Greening Program commodity road map allocated nearly 54,000 hectares of land nationwide for planting bamboo.
Under the road map, regions with the top area allocations for bamboo are Central Luzon (Region III), Calabarzon (Region IV-A) and Soccsksargen (Region XII) at 10,000 hectares each.
Authorities also set bamboo area allocations for Cordillera Administrative Region (2,600 hectares) as well as regions I (5,000 hectares), II (500 hectares), IV-B (1,000 hectares), V (4,000 hectares), VI (1,000 hectares), VII (2,000 hectares), VIII (4,000 hectares), IX (1,000 hectares), X (2,000 hectares) and Caraga (745hectares).
“Bamboo is being mainstreamed in NGP,” Philippine Bamboo Foundation Inc. (PBFI) President Edgardo Manda said Monday on the side of the exhibit he and several officials opened at Dept.of Environment and Natural Resources central office to help showcase the specie’s economic potential.
He raised urgency for increasing the Philippines’ bamboo resources, noting available data show total global bamboo trade already reached some USD11 billion yet the country accounts for only a fraction of this.
“We produce only about USD30 million worth of bamboo products annually,” he said. Manda noted PBFI partnered with DENR on the exhibit to help demonstrate that bamboo can be tapped for livelihood.
The exhibit highlights winning entries from the First Philippine Bamboo Carving Competition. Authorities estimate such hand-carved entries to fetch at least USD15,000 each in the market.
“Bamboo products like those are targeted for the high-end market to help provide good livelihood for Filipino carvers,” Manda said. Aside from bamboo, the NGP commodity road map covers timber, fuelwood, coffee, cacao, rubber, rattan and other fruit trees.
Such species will be planted in NGP production areas nationwide for harvesting to help address poverty and promote food security. NGP also targets addressing concerns on biodiversity conservation, environmental stability as well as climate change adaptation and mitigation.
The program aims greening some 1.5 million hectares of open, degraded and denuded land nationwide. Manda cited bamboo as effective in helping the country address climate change.
“Bamboo can sequester about 400 percent more carbon dioxide (CO2) than ordinary trees,” he said. CO2 is among greenhouse gases which experts said accumulate in the atmosphere, trapping heat there and causing climate change-driving global warming.
Plants sequester or remove CO2 from the atmosphere by absorbing and storing this GHG, they noted.
Manda noted bamboo is also beneficial to human health. “Oxygen produced by bamboo is 35 percent more than what ordinary trees give out,” he said. Humans need oxygen to survive, he added. [PNA]
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