The green business of tree farming

MANILA, Philippines - When you buy a wood product, do you pause and think where the wood came from?

It seems like a very insignificant question. But for one timber company based in the province of Pangasinan, it makes all the difference between the survival and destruction of the Philippines’ remaining forests — even life and death if you factor in climate change and extreme weather.

It is a question that Marsse Tropical Timber wants consumers to ponder on, which requires some educating and an appeal for concern about the environment. Also, given the nature of Marsse’s business — tree farming — the customers’ current attitudes toward wood is the company’s biggest hurdle.

“For the buyers, they are used to buying cheap wood. They ask why our products are expensive,” says Marsse executive Mara Sebastian. “This is one reason why illegal logging is rampant in the country. You can easily go to the mountains, cut the tree and sell it.”

Therefore, the marketing challenge is to convince buyers to be more conscious and mindful of where the wood comes from in making products — and why at Marsse (pronounced as “mar-say”), wood doesn’t come cheap in relative terms.

“For us, we took 20 years to grow the tree. It is our crop just as rice is a crop,” says Sebastian, explaining their business concept.

How Marsse began looked more like a mission than a venture to make money. Sebastian’s father, Mario Sebastian, was an agriculture businessman and environmentalist at heart. He was the type who would use empty ballpen barrels to hold pencils when they became too short because he didn’t want even an inch to go to waste.

Seeing the destruction wrought by the Philippines’ disappearing forests, the elder Sebastian in 1992 started collecting mahogany seeds that were just littering the grounds of Ateneo de Manila University. Since Mara and her two brothers were studying there, their father also put them to work.

Export-quality wine and shot glass servers. STAR

The seeds were grown in a nursery for two years before being put into the ground at their 60-hectare farm in Umingan town, Pangasinan. “I can tell you that I didn’t enjoy planting trees when I was a kid because I wanted to play,” Mara recalls.

The family planted 4,000 trees on their first season. Then in 2012, Sebastian’s father passed away at age 63, but at least he saw the farm’s first few harvests.

Every first quarter of the year is devoted to collecting seeds that fall from the trees at the farm. The summer months are spent removing weeds to prevent brush fires. The rainy season is for planting. The cycle is meant to ensure that there are trees ready for harvesting each year. There are 125,000 mahogany, teak and other hardwood trees at the farm today.

Trees are cut only when there is an order because as the tree grows, so does the investment. True to its founder’s ideal, the company has a “no wasted wood” policy. Each tree is maximized: trunks for export-quality lumber, cut-offs for wooden kitchenware such as pepper mills and cutting boards, small branches for firewood, and roots for making charcoal.

And — most importantly — for every tree that is cut, a new one is planted.

Planting environmental consciousness in buyers’ mindsets will take some time. However, thanks to all the talk about climate change and episodes of extreme weather such as super typhoon Haiyan in 2013, consumer trends have been turning green lately.

More and more stores are now shunning plastic bags and have replaced them with reusable bags. Many products make it a point to state in their packaging that they used environmentally friendly materials like recycled paper.

Last month, artists Jason Mraz, Maroon 5 and Michael Franti got together to produce a video urging musical instrument manufacturers to mind where they source their wood. They likened illegally cut wood — dubbed “blood wood” — to so-called “blood diamonds” sold by warlords to fund their conflicts.

The Department of Environment and Natural Resources puts the Philippines’ remaining forests at 23 percent. Conservation International, however, pegs the figure at seven percent. An estimated 150,000 hectares of forest are destroyed each year.

Sebastian thinks it is just a matter of time before all the trees are gone if nothing big is done about it fast enough. Tree farming may provide one solution if done on a large scale. That is why Marsse holds seminars on tree farming to plant seeds of the future.

“The Philippines is so biodiverse and eco diverse. Our natural resources are so rich, but we neglected them,” Sebastian says. “We cannot do anything about the past. But we can do something about the present and the future. The best time to plant trees was 20 years ago. The next best time is now.”