Passage of People’s Mining Bill sought

NATIONAL environmental network Kalikasan welcomed the approval of House Bill (HB) 259, or the “People’s Mining Bill,” by the House Committee on Natural Resources as an alternative to the Mining Act of 1995, which it deemed to favor the plunder of the country’s natural resources.

The group’s Facebook statement on Tuesday said that the passage of the bill was “a step in the right direction toward a genuinely pro-people and pro-environment framework for mining.”

It criticized the provisions of the current Republic Act (RA) 7942, or the “Mining Act of 1995,” for elevating the interests of foreign mining companies over those of Filipinos. The Kalikasan statement continued, “In the past 28 years, we have also seen how the Mining Act’s implementation deprived local communities of access to land and natural resources, kept the domestic economy underdeveloped and destroyed the environment at an appalling scale.”

Among the issues the group cited were the 1996 Marcopper mining disaster, the 2005 Rapu-Rapu mine cyanide spills in Albay and the 2012 tailings pond leak in the Philex mine in Tuba, Benguet.

In contrast, it said that the People’s Mining Bill “covers not only the exploration, development, use, processing and transportation of the country’s mineral resources — but their regulated use as well. This regulation is a much-needed aspect of any use of non-renewable resources that the current mining law virtually ignores.”

Kalikasan called on environmentalists to support their call for the passage of HB 259, which “aims to reverse the liberalization of the mining industry that RA 7942 institutionalized, the very framework that allowed the plunder of our country’s mineral resources.”