Nursery owners to destroy 1m trees on World Forest Day

The country’s largest nursery owners on Wednesday said that they would set on fire one million seedlings on the World Forest Day in protest against the forestation policies of the government.
Ijaz Ali, a nursery owner from Mardan, and Shaukat Ali from Swat said March 21 would be observed as World Forest Day throughout the world but in Pakistan it would be observed in protest against the flawed forestation policies.
They announced that they would kill one million seedlings of deodar (the national tree of Pakistan), pine wallancia, Chir pine and chalgoza pine on World Forest Day in Islamabad.
“In the first phase, 10,000 seedlings would be destroyed in Islamabad and ninety thousand would be killed in three nurseries in Mardan and Swat. Rest of the one million seedlings would be killed subsequently,” they said.
Ali said that the extreme step was being taken as a last resort to shakeup national conscience and to make people think what is wrong with Pakistan’s forestation policies.
“There is no forestation in Pakistan despite the fact that millions of seedlings and millions of acres of suitable land was available,” said Ijaz Ali.
He added that all the seedlings which were grown in our nurseries had been painstakingly taken care of for four to seven years.
“During all these years, we were not able to sell a single seedling for forestation purposes, despite the fact that we are the largest grower of seedlings of coniferous species in Pakistan.
During all these years we have managed to carry our business forward through our own resources, without any help from the government.
We have an ever ready plantation stock which is more than the stock of all the forest nurseries put together,” he lamented.
He said it is sad that we are taking this step but in the absence of any genuine demand for the last five years, we were unable to take care of the seedlings anymore.
“The seedlings we are destroying will die anyways by this time next year, because we have neither the will nor the finances to carry out these activities any longer,” he said.
“Our question for the policy makers is that how will they justify the huge claims of forestation of the state forest departments each year? As usual, we are sure the claims of millions of the plantation at sites unknown will surface in workshops and in briefings to the high ups and huge chunks of money would be plundered,” he concluded.