Miners invite Duterte to rehabilitated mines

MANILA— The local mining industry is inviting President Rodrigo Duterte to visit some rehabilitated mines in the country after he recently agreed with banning the open-pit mining method, an order issued by former Environment chief Gina Lopez.

The Chamber of Mines of the Philippines (COMP) said it hopes to show to the president a number of surface mines, those that underwent open-pit mining, that have been rehabilitated.

“We would like to invite the president to come and see some of the older mines where we can already show that there is rehabilitation. We know that he has flown over some parts of Surigao but those are the newer mines that have not gone through some sort of rehabilitation,” COMP Chairman Gerard Brimo said on the sidelines of the Mining Conference Philippines 2017 yesterday.

“There’s a number of them. We will come up with a list and hopefully present it to him. We would be delighted if he could spare us some of his valuable and busy time to visit these mines,” he added.

Duterte on Tuesday said he agrees with the open pit ban considering the environmental damage it causes. He also asked Environment Secretary Roy Cimatu to look into the eventual closure of open-pit mining.

However, he said he would give mining firms time to find other ways to extract minerals.

“I agree with Gina Lopez that it has to stop some time. But I’ll give the mining companies enough elbow room for eventual change in the modality of getting what’s inside the bowels of the earth,” Duterte said.

The chamber, on the other hand, maintained that there is no other way to get the minerals but to do the open-pit method.

“For deposits near surface, there’s only one way to do it and that’s open pit and that’s the case in the Philippines as it is all over the world,” Brimo said.

“That’s the reality, if you want minerals and metals that we need in our daily life, we need to accept that,” he added.

Despite this, stakeholders emphasized that open pit mines can still be rehabilitated like in the case of Rio Tuba Nickel Mining Corp. and Taganito Mining Corp., both owned by listed Nickel Asia Corp.

“Rio Tuba is an active mining area, right beside is a forest and that forest used to be an old mining pit while in Taganito, the vegetation in the rehab area is actually better than the original vegetation,” Brimo said.