A student of Faculty of Forestry, Michael Jose Mairing, won an Editorial Cartoon Contest organized by the forestry section of Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The Best Editorial Cartoon award was delivered in the Asia Pacific Forestry Week (APFW) from 22 to 29 March 2016 in the Philippines.
Editorial cartoon contest is part of activities of APFW and attended by participants from various groups in the Asia-Pacific region. Activities are aimed to raise awareness of the global community about the importance of forests in sustainable development. The competition’s theme was “Growing Our Future” during which participants were asked to create works that illustrate the current situation of forestry in the Asia-Pacific region.
Jose says he managed to win the contest by sending his editorial cartoons entitled “Protect Our Future”. In his work Jose describes the dilemmatic condition of forests in Indonesia. On his artwork, he shows various parties which are trying to save the forest through a number of actions, one of which was tree planting. While on the other hand, many parties destroy a forest to meet the needs of palm oil which led to forest fires.
“The message I convey through this image is to not only build the forest, but also protect the forest from various destructive acts,” he said on Wednesday (13/4) at UGM.
Jose said he was happy and proud to be selected as the winner in editorial cartoon contest at the international level. He never imagined that he could win this contest. In the future, he was more motivated to continue to produce other works that could contribute to the development, especially in the field of forestry.
Beside accepting his award, Jose was also selected to join the 2016 Conference of APFW which was attended by about 300 participants from researchers, scientists, entrepreneurs, NGOs, and students from 40 countries in the world.
In APFW, Jose joined the Forester Youth Summit panel and discussed the issue of sustainable forest management. In this forum each country made a presentation about the forestry situation of their country.
“I gained many experiences from this forum related to forestry issues in the world,” he concluded.