Lawmakers had rejected his environment secretary-nominee. Now he sees farmers and fishers suffering from mine poisons.

Mindanao. There the river is pristine at the source, but only a kilometer away where dozens of processing backyards are the water is black. (I’ve been there thrice and saw it myself.) In cement open ponds, banned acid and mercury are used to separate the gold from the rocks. The poison is ejected to the river, which with mud from tunnels cascades to the rice and fruit plantations below and onto the sea. From the hillside, the sea view is brown for many kilometers away, until it mixes with the blue Pacific. No fish to be caught there; the corals long have choked to death. From dawn to dusk around the hills can be heard dynamite blasts by tunnel diggers. The stench in the air is permanent. Diwalwal is no wilderness; half a million people have been living there since the 1980s.

In the mountains of Agusan to the north is SR Metals. There the nickel mine of a Liberal Party financier and a congressman does its own damage. Starting as smallscale in the mid-1990s, they unilaterally reinterpreted their mining limit of 100,000 tons of rock ore a year to 100,000 tons of processed nickel. Thus they ravaged not only their small concession but an entire mountain range – until the Supreme Court fined and closed them down in 2008. Two years later during the Presidency of LP chairman Noynoy Aquino they reopened as a large-scale mine. Not only did they illegally get such new license despite their dark past, Aquino even awarded them as exemplary miners. That farce goes on to this day.

In Zambales, Luzon, facing the West Philippine Sea, the townsfolk of Masinloc, Sta. Cruz, and Candelaria suffer as well from nickel mining. In just one day in July 2011 the LP governor signed philstar.com/opinion/2013/07/29/1025811/ zambales-ruling-means-protection-againstchinese-miners-elsewhere). The Supreme Court stopped the Chinese miners in 2013, but three Filipino firms continued the destruction.

Duterte said in the State of the Nation that “anti-mining” Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez Jr. would ensure the enactment of sterner mining laws. Interviewed the next day by DZBB’s Ali Sotto and Arnold Clavio, Alvarez said he is particularly peeved with influential persons who are able to obtain mining permits then sell to dirty miners.

* * * Jubilant as well are health activists. Duterte finally might untie the deadlock over the Reproductive Health Law at the Supreme Court.

Duterte had chided the High Tribunal for the indefinite injunction against the RH Law. Millions of families in need of safe contraceptives remain unaided as billions of pesos in government medicines expire due to the two-year-long delay in the case resolution. Anti-RH lawyers had claimed that the law promotes unconstitutional abortion. Doctors counter that it doesn't, and are raring to argue so. But the High Court has not scheduled deliberations on the merits, as unnamed Catholic justices prevent it. Duterte insinuated that the delay could mean the anti-RH side is weak in law.

* * * Catch Sapol radio show, Saturdays, 8-10 a.m., DWIZ (882-AM).

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