Anyway it's just one of the very few books that is in English plus it would be a good reference for me so I started reading it.
Learned quite a lot already by just reading the introduction: ROK (South Korea) occupies 45% of the Korean Peninsula, they usually just have two typhoons per year (kakainggit naman, the Philippines have more than 20), forest covers 64% of their land area which is composed mostly of coniferous forests, and they have a growing stock od 97.8 cu.m. per hectare in 2007 which means it could be higher now.
It was not as if they haven't had problems on deforestation. They had their fair share in the 1950s that in the 1960s their growing stock was merely 10.6 cu.m. per hectare. How they've come from that to the present situation is amazing.
Having spent most of my life in a mountainous area and having been witness (both first hand - where I've seen recovered bodies of victims of a landslide laid in an elementary classroom - and through the television) to various disasters caused by typhoons which was intensified by the lost of forest cover, I could not help but wish that the Philippines could do the same.
The first chapter is about Changes in Forest Ownership. The Korean government conducted a Forestland Cadastral Survey and subsequently the transfer of forest ownership. After reading this part I realized it's a very long, winding, and difficult road for the Philippines to follow what was done in Korea. With all the land disputes and the claims of ancestral land domains by indigenous groups. Even government agencies' roles (DENR and NCIP) and laws or policies are sometimes in conflict.
Will I see greener mountains with the implementation of the NGP? Will the local governments especially in the Cordilleras be able to stop the conversion of forested areas to vegetable farms? These, and a lot more questions are still hard to answer.
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