LAHORE: A tree planting initiative, meant for south Punjab was unfairly and ‘arbitrarily’ stopped at the behest of Prime Minister Imran Khan without realising that the campaign would have benefitted the atmosphere in the region tremendously, claim those who were a part of it.

The South Punjab Forest Company (SPFC) was a public-private partnership initiative, started by Awais Leghari who served as federal minister for power from October 2017 to May 2018 when Shahid Khaqan Abbasi was the prime minister.

This is a surprising move by the government, especially since only a few days ago PM Khan had announced that the public-private partnership would serve as a very important source of development as the government funds were scant and collaboration with the private sector would help it tremendously.

It is also surprising since in June 2018, the AGP gave a clean chit to the project but sometime after the general election in September the same year, the Supreme Court said it wanted the deal renegotiated. The SC asked the newly-appointed cabinet of Punjab to reconsider the previous government’s scheme of converting a barren stretch of southern Punjab into a forest.

South Punjab is facing a serious issue of desertification, owing to deforestation. In fact, lack of forest cover is alarming in the whole Pakistan. According to international standards, every country should have at least 25pc of forest cover. Pakistan has only 4.5 to 4.8pc (according to government figures but even this is debatable).

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the whole country has only 1.5pc of forest cover. Likewise, in Punjab, of 20.63m hectares of land, only 3.76pc is covered by forests. The south Punjab is in the worst situation, with arid zones, drought and salinity affecting the land there.

Awais Leghari, who spearheaded the campaign, calls himself a ‘keen forester’ and says he has planted a citrus orchard and uses the drip irrigation for it. He adds that due to constant robbing of forest land by the forest department itself as well as the timber mafia, the number of trees has gone down drastically.

“This programme aimed at working through a completely transparent bidding process, much of which had started, would have brought many investors forward,” he says.

The agreement timeline was for 15 years after which it could have either continued or all the allotted land would be returned back to the government, with the complete forest cover.

The SPFC was established by the Punjab government as a public sector not-for-profit company on Sept 28, 2015 under section 42 of the Companies Act 2017, as provided under section 78(A) of the Punjab Forest (Amended) Act, 2016.

For this purpose, 42 blank forest areas were assigned to the SPFC by Forestry, Wildlife & Fisheries Department (FW&FD) in six districts of the south Punjab, comprising DG Khan, Rajanpur, Muzaffargarh, Bahawalpur, Bahawalnagar and Rahim Yar Khan.

The FW&FD, through a notification, dated 16-03-2016, assigned 134,995 acres blank/barren/waste forest land to the SPFC for this purpose.

Tahir Rasheed, the chief executive officer of the SPFC, says when they examined the land, 35,000 acres of it was in bad shape with terrible soil erosion. While for the rest, the campaign had started and bidders were investing in the project.

“The south Punjab faces the worst of the climatic change, including thunderstorms, dust storms, soil and wind erosion, while there is a high level of forest land being taken over by the department itself,” he says. “With less vegetation, the long-term impact has been that the carbon dioxide absorption had decreased”.

Mr Rasheed fears that with the scrapping of the SPFC, housing schemes will emerge on the land that had been allotted to them by the previous government.

“Similar projects have been running with success in China, India, Brazil, Indonesia and Malaysia,” he argues. “We had so many bidders that 480 billion USD were being circulated for this. Put this figure next to the GDP of 2017 which was 305 billion USD.

Rasheed bemoans that the matter was heavily politicised for no reason and was sabotaged.

“There were allegations of nepotism and other claims which we have rubbished.”

Ironically, the same government, which had been campaigning for Green Pakistan, has scrapped this wonderful initiative, says Rasheed.

Awais Leghari says internationally credible environmental watch groups, including International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and World Wildlife Fund (WWF) were both on board during the bidding process. Besides, 15,000 jobs would have been created for this.

“This is the government loss,” he says. He alleges that the timber mafia is behind scrapping of the project.

Leghari and Rasheed both claim that the project would have resulted in more than 72m trees.

“The timber mafia which works with the forest department operates through local political bigwigs,” says Leghari.

He says there was bureaucratic resistance against the project from the moment it was launched.

Published in Dawn, May 25th, 2019