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The great lynchpin of the government argument is that it will only
promote and permit sustainable mining while severely punishing any
company who does not live up to the high environmental standards set
by the Mining Act.
Unfortunately, this argument is flawed from the
beginning, as there is no such thing as sustainable mining. There is
smart mining, there is mining that causes limited environmental
damage, but these types of mining are rarely of the large scale,
vast hectarage variety which the government ceaselessly promotes as
the hope of the future.
Mining is among the most destructive practices
known to man. Mitigation is possible, replanting an area with
forestry, treating the tailings ponds and so on, but an apt analogy
given by a local antimining advocate was: “if you peel the skin
off a fruit but do not eat it, could you still call it a fruit? A
mining company will hollow out mountains and then cover them with
dirt and the will still call it a mountain.”
What is considered as safe mining in other
countries is mining done with an eye to the environment in check and
so is done in the far wilderness, in areas where there is little or
no human presence. While this raises a host of other problems, no
human communities are at risk.
Contrast that with the Philippines. The mining
sites that have garnered the greatest attention—Rapu-rapu, Didipio
and Canatuan—are ones where the community itself is rejecting the
mine. Rapu-rapu’s operations affect not only the stretch of the
island by the waters upon which the municipalities of Sorsogon
depend on for their fishing. Didipio, famous for filing the case
against the Mining Act, is an agricultural community that views the
mine as a risk to their already developed industry and Canatuan is a
classic example of a community divided against itself by mining. In
the Philippines, the environmental costs of mining are compounded by
their human costs.
Even a mine relatively isolated can affect the
community, if only because of the Philippines’ geography. We do
not have vast stretches of unbroken wilderness. The areas that
matter have been populated. The rivers that mining companies will
utilize for their water and the forests they will need to clear have
already been claimed, years ahead by the communities living in the
area. This ecosystem of ours is small and interconnected. What
happens in the far hills reaches to the shore, just as in the Marcopper
disaster.
Similarly, the incidents at Rapu-rapu at the end
of the year 2005 were an example of geography coming into play,
alongside a display in the lack of common sense. The tailings ponds
at the Lafayette site overflowed when torrential rains flooded them.
As a country regularly struck typhoons per year, it seems more than
a little senseless that a company had not taken such an obvious
consideration as the weather into their planning.
Among civil society, it has long been suspected
that there is a disconnect in the government’s policies toward
mining and the reality of mining. Both the Act and the National
Minerals Plan (NMP) seem to be born of this disconnect, wherein the
government considers mining without considering the Philippine
geography. The economic considerations of the Mining Act seem to be
the source of this. Money, particularly in the amounts promised by
the mining industry is an attraction enough as it is. An application
for an FTAA requires an investment of P50 million. To a government
whose desperation for funds is palpable, mining is a windfall and it
is easy to replace the reality with its promises.
Everything about the Mining Act and the NMP
screams “make more money.” If it did not, then companies would
find no reason to invest. If it actually promised to be stringent on
mining, tough on violators and interested in development, mining
companies would not be here.
The third world is attractive to miners because
it is lax and welcoming, not because it has adopted laws as
stringent as the first world countries whose populations and
government would respond to mining violations with brutal, legal
swiftness. It is absolutely in the interest of mining companies to
work in the their world, and make sure that the countries they work
with have low environmental and social standards of accountability,
if they have any at all.
In the NMP, it is recommended that mining be a
self-regulated industry, with the DENR, the MGB and the EMB existing
only to facilitate the set up of mines with their miners doing their
own monitoring. Their accountability to the public is set to nil. We
know why this is, is because miners helped write the Mining Act. To
spend a few million pesos to tap untold billions of mineral
resources is good business any way one looks at it.
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