Bowing to mining oligarchs

We strongly condemn the recommendation to revoke the landmark ban on open pit mining by the Mining Industry Coordinating Council (MICC). While President Rodrigo Duterte and his Cabinet still has a chance to not heed this recommendation, the unanimous decision of his handpicked henchmen, Environment Secretary Roy Cimatu and Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez, co-chairs of the MICC, is as good as a stamp of approval from Duterte himself.

Despite all the bluster and hot air about holding large-scale mines accountable, Duterte turns out to be nothing but a stool pigeon of mining oligarchs.

Let us recall that the premise of Duterte’s appointment of ex-general Cimatu to the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) was his supposed military firmness in holding big mines and destructive projects accountable. This is far from Cimatu’s actual subservience to mining oligarchs by repudiating the open pit mining ban and other remarkable regulations instituted by his predecessor, the bold and fiery Gina Lopez.

Prohibiting open pit mining in the context of the Mining Act of 1995 promoting the impunity of land grabs, plunder, and pollution should have been one of the clearest expressions of Duterte’s promise of social justice, his promise that change is coming.

We have seen numerous open pit mines left abandoned and unrehabilitated, leaking toxics and slowly murdering surrounding ecosystems. The argument that only pre-Mining Act open pit mines are abandoned is belied by one of the earliest ‘flagship’ large-scale mines under former president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s mining revitalization program, the Rapu-Rapu Polymetallic Mine in Albay.

A 2015 environmental investigation mission by scientist group AGHAM revealed that the RapuRapu mine was left unrehabilitated even with its South Korean owner KORES spending all of its P158 million Mining Rehabilitation Fund. Water tests demonstrated continuing toxic acid mine drainage generation in one of the creeks downstream from the abandoned mine, registering extreme acidity with pH levels of 3.25 to 3.42 far below the DENR standards for irrigation.

As we speak, various frontline communities in the country are struggling against open-pit mine projects to avert risks of mine disasters and to take back the lands and forests in which their villages thrived. In Kasibu, Nueva Vizcaya, the indigenous Ifugao are protesting Australian-Canadian miner Oceanagold’s Didipio mine. Across four provinces in Mindanao, indigenous Lumad communities have succeeded in delaying the Tampakan mining project.

We call on the Filipino people to stand firm in the principle that destructive mining plunder is not welcome in our lands, and to fight tooth and nail against the Duterte regime’s attempt to sneak the country’s mining crisis past the public’s vigilance.--