Environmental group hits EO on mining

MANILA, Philippines - Environmental activists yesterday slammed President Aquino’s long-delayed executive order on mining as the height of the government’s irresponsibility to the environment and people.

“Two years under the Aquino administration can be summarized as a regime of wrong environmental policy that promotes plunder-as-usual development projects, especially on mining,” said Clemente Bautista, national coordinator of Kalikasan-Philippines Network for Environment.

Bautista said the new mining policy that Aquino has promised since 2011 continues to be delayed by powerful mining lobby groups.

“This is due to their watering down of regulatory provisions that can be clearly seen in the government’s latest pronouncements on the EO, which include the shelving of the proposed five-percent royalty tax on mines, and the overriding of local mining ban legislation by national mining laws,” he added.

Bautista said that despite provisions on the protection of 78 tourism areas, the EO will possibly leave the protection of agricultural lands to the CARPer (Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program extension with reforms) law, which fails to prevent land use conversion.

“It also glosses over the fact that the plunder promoted by the Mining Act of 1995 is still in place,” he added.

The group said that despite a reduction of 110,256 hectares covered by mineral agreements in 2012 from the previous year, the gross production value of large-scale metallic mines actually increased at the end of 2011 by 18.9 billion pesos, while metal to exports have increased from 3.8 to 5.6 percent.

“The increase in mineral production and exports by foreign and large-scale mining transnational corporations (TNCs) indicates that their handsome profits have continued to expand under the (Aquino) government. But this is at the expense of communities and the environment that continue to be negatively affected by irresponsible mines across the nation, as permitted by Aquino’s continued coddling of mining investments,” Bautista pointed out.

He referred to the mining operations by Altamina Exploration and Resources in Pangasinan and Ilocos Norte, the infractions of large-scale mines in protected areas of the North Western Panay Peninsula, and the impending economic dislocation of thousands of subsistence small-scale miners in Pantukan, Compostela Valley, among others.

“The rise of human rights violations in mining operations was also very apparent in the past year, with eight recorded human-rights violations on mining activists from July 2011 compared to the five cases in 2010,” Bautista said.

The group vowed to mobilize its member-organizations during Aquino’s second State of the Nation Address (SONA) to demand concrete actions on mining and other destructive reclamation projects and coal-fired power plants.