Miyawaki forests turning the new rage in Kerala

Thiruvananthapuram, Jan 29 : Prof Akira Miyawaki , the noted botanist from Japan, turns 93 on Friday, but his “Miyawaki model”, presented in the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), Earth Summit in June 1992, has become a rage in Kerala with the state government and private players developing these forests which could be cultivated even in a small area. In the 1994 Paris climate summit also this proposal was a major hit.
It was MR Hari ,Managing Director of Invis multimedia, who set out to meet Prof Akira Miyawaki of the Yokohoma National University in Japan to get a personal feel on this type of forests and to understand about it in person.
Kerala now has 1.6 acre land of “Miyawaki model ” in the state spread across 10 districts with minimum of 10 cents and maximum of 20 cents of land.
Miyawaki who won the “Blue Planet” award – one of the most prestigious awards in environment conservation after accepting the award at the age of 78 has said “I want to cultivate plants and trees for 30 more years, I want to create forests of live and nothing else”.
The first Miyawaki forest in Kerala became operational three years ago and it was at the property of MR Hari in Puliyarakonam, a 15-km drive from Thiruvananthapuram city. The forest was in 3 cents of plot and in this three cents of land a variety of 500 plants, trees, creepers have formed in this forest.
Hari, while speaking to IANS, said: “The trees touched 30 ft in height in three years and I had to prune these trees as their branches could fall in heavy winds and create problems. This is not in line with the Miyawaki idea of not cutting the branches but I had to make certain changes for practical purposes”.