This article about mangrove planting in Jagna seems to be out of tangent. We based our topic on the picture in the Jagna Edition of the Post. Then we find to our horror that Jagna was playing firemen and the mangrove planting was in Maribojoc some seventy kilometers away and the draft was already finished so we will stick to the planting. Anyway, we had mangrove planting in our barangay before and it was a howling failure. In this barangay there are three species of seagoing plants .which we call mangrove. The inland type with small oval leaves is the white mangrove or the “mawro”. They thrive in brackish water so they cannot be planted on sea shores. The second is the ‘pagatpat” or black mangrove. They can tolerate hundred percent sea water so they can grow on sea shores. They are sturdy, so sturdy that they weather severe storms, round leafed and shoot up air roots some fifteen centimeters high from under their thick, shiny round leaves are favorite goat fodder.

The third specie is the red mangrove, “bakhaw” or “bakawan”. Their leaves are pointed oblong, they throw out prop roots starting high in the trunk reaching to the ground bracing the plant against storms.. Their bark yields high quality tannin, used for dyeing or flavoring tuba. Their fruit or seed look like darts, with a long pointed root on one end and the kernel with rudimentary leaves at the other. This is the specie found at the manmade forest at the back of Baclayon Central Elementary School. This Jagna seashore once attempted to plant red mangrove on their shores once. Barangay personnel pounded a stake on the mud, bore a hole alongside it, inserted the root of the mangrove seed in the hole and tied the seed to the stake. They planted a few hundreds of seeds. The seed thrived, grew up to a meter high and started to throw out leaves. Like all barangay projects, it was only good at the start.

Jagna, whose people treat the sea as a convenient garbage dump has a good share of floating plastics and other debris. Those floating garbage get snagged in the young bakhaw branches at high tide. Each high tide adds more garbage until at some low tide the young tree bends down and break. Since a young bakhaw cannot regenerate itself when broken it, reaches a premature end. After two years the project was not even back to square one but square zero. It was as if no project has been attempted. It is a convenient way of wasting tax money. Go through the motions of producing something, estimate how much can be made out of it, take the money and go. If the project survives and flourishes, place a sign;” this project was made possible from the funds of so and so”. If it fails, no one will be the wiser since it did not leave at least a tree stump. A conscientious LGU official once objected to a wasteful project... He told his immediate superior “Giing nan ka nako ayaw buhata, imong gibuhat, karon tan awa. I want that in the minutes. In English. The secretary wrote “I told you do not do, you do. Now look at”.