Bamboo as a land use in Bukidnon and Northern Mindanao

In May 2010 Executive Order 879 made bamboo industry development a priority programme of the government and created the Philippine Bamboo Industry Development Council, chaired by the Secretary of Trade and Industry.¹ It told the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) to plant bamboo on at least 20% of its yearly reforestation and rehabilitation areas, especially in towns with bamboo industries or where poor sites, erosion or steep slopes make trees hard to grow. The Department of Agriculture was to find idle farmland for bamboo "without sacrificing areas used for food production". Schools were to buy a share of their desks in bamboo: 25% in the order's title, 20% in its text. The order's preamble recalls a commitment to reforest at least 500,000 hectares with bamboo, part of the country's contribution to an ASEAN goal of new forest by 2020.¹ In 2023 the council's vice chairman was seeking legislative support to institutionalise the order, and reported that the House had approved House Bill 7941, on the bamboo sector, on second reading.⁹ How much bamboo the country has is unclear: FAO's 2007 survey, drawing on the country's own report, gave 172,000 hectares in 2005, about 2% of it planted,³ while INBAR's country page, citing the Forest Management Bureau, puts the natural stand at about 10,000 hectares, of which private plantations account for over 1,500. The country has 62 documented bamboo species, 21 of them endemic.²

Bukidnon, in the uplands of Northern Mindanao, is one of the places this policy lands. FAO's map lists it among the country's major bamboo sources.³ Reporting on 8 March 2026 from a bamboo summit of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) in Cebu, The Freeman wrote that Mindanao has been designated the country's bamboo hub under the government's quadrant strategy.¹² In Bukidnon giant bamboo, Dendrocalamus asper, a large clumping species native to Southeast Asia, is used for engineered bamboo products, and a government research project lists a community nursery and plantation of it at Dalwangan, Malaybalay.⁷ An Indigenous association, BUKDAA, has planted 20 hectares of it and 20 of cacao on the banks of the Pulangi River with a UNDP grant of US$185,000, and expects bamboo sales of $2,800 a year from year seven, rising to $11,200 from year ten.⁸ In 2023 the firm Rizome was buying bamboo slats from agrarian reform beneficiaries in Bukidnon, North Cotabato, the Agusan provinces and Surigao, and committed up to $100 million to an engineered bamboo plant in Cagayan de Oro.⁹ The RIZOME Kawayan Project plants giant bamboo on degraded land with Indigenous communities across Mindanao. In August 2025 Climate Impact Partners announced it as the first project in Asia registered under Verra's VM0047 afforestation and reforestation methodology, and said it is expected to remove more than three million tonnes of carbon over 20 years.^10,11

How a clump is cut matters as much as what is planted. A six-year trial in Bukidnon found that harvesting edible shoots worked against culm yield. High culm yields came only when most shoots were left to grow into two-year-old culms for harvest, while keeping every shoot and culm crowded the clump and cut shoot production. Average culm yields were over 40 dry tonnes per hectare a year.⁴ Earlier trials planted eight species, giant bamboo among them, on 2,100 hectares of degraded land at 14 sites, and found their roots formed a network within a metre of the surface that prevented erosion.⁵ The endemic laak, Bambusa philippinensis, yielded 15,000 culms a hectare three years after planting and 25,000 at a second harvest two years later.^5,18 A trial elsewhere on another large clumping bamboo, Dendrocalamus hamiltonii, compared selective, horseshoe and clear cutting and found that cutting more culms drew more new shoots, but fewer new culms.⁶

Who needs an answer

• The Bamboo Industry Development Council and the Department of Trade and Industry, deciding where planting and processing should grow and how to meet the order's procurement shares.
• DENR, choosing species and sites for the bamboo share of reforestation, on slopes and riverbanks where trees struggle.
• Smallholders, agrarian reform beneficiaries and Indigenous groups such as BUKDAA, who must wait years for a first harvest and choose between shoots, poles, slats and carbon income.
• Processors such as Rizome, who need a steady supply of culms of the right age and size.
• Carbon project developers and buyers. DOST is also working with DENR, the Department of Energy and the Climate Change Commission to set up a committee to oversee carbon credits and see that the benefits reach farmers.¹²

The domains it chains

Slope, soil and the roots that hold riverbanks; how clumps grow back after cutting; native bamboo in mixed stands against rows of one species; shoots and cacao as food; carbon in clumps and in products; prices for poles, slats, panels and credits; land tenure and Indigenous rights.

What a twin should let people try

• Harvest rules: which mix of shoot cutting, culm age and cutting intensity gives the most culms over twenty years, and how fast a clump recovers from each.
• Species and site: on a given slope or stretch of riverbank, how do giant bamboo in rows and native species in mixed stands compare for erosion, income and carbon?
• Carbon or timber: how does selling credits change when, and how much, a grower can cut, and what does it pay compared with selling culms?
• Land: how many hectares would meet DENR's 20% share and a processor's demand without taking land used for food?

Where to start

FAO's World bamboo resources gives national figures for area, growing stock and ownership.³ INBAR's 2019 Manual for Bamboo Forest Biomass and Carbon Assessment gives guidelines for assessing and monitoring biomass and carbon in bamboo forests and plantations, which, bamboo being a grass, need methods different from those for trees.¹³ The Bukidnon and JIRCAS trials give yields and growth to calibrate against,^4,5 and Climate Impact Partners links the registered VM0047 project to Verra's registry as project 4788.¹⁰ Ecosystem-service models such as InVEST can map erosion and carbon for a change in land cover.

New uses are changing what a culm is worth. ISO 22156:2021 covers structural design with round bamboo for buildings up to two storeys and 7 m.¹⁵ ISO 7567:2024, the first international standard for an engineered bamboo product, covers glued laminated bamboo. Representatives of the Philippines were among those who took part in the online discussions of its drafts.¹⁶ China and INBAR launched the Bamboo as a Substitute for Plastic initiative in November 2022 and released its Global Action Plan for 2023 to 2030 a year later.¹⁷ A project listed by DOST's agriculture research council treats fibre from three endemic species, laak among them, for textiles,¹⁸ and in 2017 a firm in Pangasinan piloted a DOST institute's kiln that makes charcoal from bamboo, using the stem base usually left behind after poles are harvested.¹⁹ On carbon, in 2013 the Gold Standard included bamboo at least 2 m tall in its afforestation and reforestation requirements,¹⁴ and in 2021 INBAR listed Clean Development Mechanism and Verra methodologies under which bamboo forestry projects can be certified.¹³