Visit our work sites, miners ask Duterte

The local mining industry is inviting President Duterte to visit some rehabilitated mines in the country following his pronouncements he supported the former environment secretary’s order banning open-pit mining.

The Chamber of Mines of the Philippines (COMP) said it hopes to show to the President a number of surface mines that have undergone open pit mining and 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 and Gerard Brimo said on the sidelines of the Mining Conference Philippines 2017 Wednesday.

“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 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.

COMP, on the other hand, maintained there is no other way to get the minerals but through 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.

“In nickel, we can do progressive rehabilitation. We want to show the President that we can actually do this,” he added.

The Department of Environment and Natural Resources, for its part, assured that mining would continue in the country as this is one of the drivers of the economy.

“The President has already announced that mining operations will continue because there is a law. If that’s the direction of the President then we will be complying with that,” Environment Undersecretary Jonas Leones said during the conference.

The Interagency Mining Industry Coordinating Council said the anti-open pit mining policy is still under review.

“The MICC (Mining Industry Coordinating Council) remains to be recommendatory and the secretary will review it and consult the President and the chamber. As soon as there is a result of the evaluation, we will sit down and discuss this with stakeholders,” he added.

Meanwhile, some 300 activists from various environmental groups and anti-mining organizations stormed the venue of the mining conference.