Kalikasan People’s Network for the Environment
Statement
July 02 2025
Kalikasan People’s Network for the Environment condemns in the strongest terms DENR Secretary Raphael Lotilla’s shameless move to corporate and privatize our public forest lands, through the department’s recently established Sustainable Forest Land Management Agreement (SFLMPA). This policy is a blatant handover of our nation’s forests to profit-driven corporations and private entities, masquerading under the rhetoric of “sustainability”, “reforestation”, and “poverty-alleviation” parroted by President Marcos Jr..
The SFLMPA subjects an initial 1.2 million hectares – part of the country’s total 15.8 million hectares total of forest lands – to the predatory interests of big business. Investors are granted renewable 25-year contracts,exemption from logging bans, and the outrageous right to exploit up to 40,000 hectares of public land for private gain. This is tantamount to the wholesale auctioning of our natural heritage and patrimony.
Alarmingly, a significant portion of these forest lands overlap with the ancestral lands of indigenous peoples. While the law requires free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC), the reality is that land conflicts, militarization, harassment, and state violence terrorizing our IP communities have made a mockery of these supposed safeguards. The SFLMPA only deepens the threat to indigenous and rural poor communities, especially in Mindanao, where intensified Lumad killings are already linked to resource plunder and militarized land grabs.
Lotilla himself has brazenly admitted that the SFLMPA is designed to grease the entry of potential investors and transform the Philippines into a net wood exporter. The so-called “reforestation” could simply mean converting biodiverse forests into monoculture tree plantations for timber wood harvesting for massive exports, erasing our rich ecosystems and the livelihoods they support. This is large-scale ecological destruction designed as environmental policy.
DENR claims that the SFLMPA will alleviate poverty through community involvement in agroforestry, ecotourism, and forest plantations. In reality, this is a hollow gesture. The policy centralizes state control and surveillance, while giving large corporations monopoly power over our forests for profit. It reduces communities to mere laborers, not genuine stewards or decision-makers over their own land.
Without genuine national industries to process our resources for the benefit of all Filipinos, these arrangements only perpetuate our dependence on foreign markets and deepen exploitation. What we get in return is environmental ruin and further marginalization of the poor and indigenous peoples
The SFLMPA is ultimately a self-serving policy conceived from the rent-seeking and predatory motives of private firms that betrays the public interest. True environmental conservation can only be achieved by centering the people’s struggle – by upholding the rights of communities, respecting indigenous sovereignty, and advancing genuine social justice. The state must serve the people, not corporate greed. And when it does not – the people are only justified in its resistance.
