Mining mayhem triggers eco-disaster in Zambales

Mining mayhem triggers eco-disaster in Zambales

by JAILEEN F. JIMENO, PCIJ 

08/19/2009 | 12:04 AM 

Posted at www.gmanews.tv

STA. CRUZ, ZAMBALES – Nickel is not doing too well in the world market these days, but residents here do not seem to mind, even though nickel has become one of this town’s major revenue earners. 

That’s because whenever nickel commands top dollar, red dust smothers the town's main highway and the pier, and red mud cakes the roads. Residents also have to share their small barangay roads with huge, lumbering trucks, and when rains come, flood waters the color of blood fill their ricefields. Meanwhile, up in the mountains, armed guards hired by mining firms menace real and imagined foes and sometimes engage each other in deadly shootouts. 

No wonder Zambales Governor Amor Deloso has taken to describing Sta. Cruz – some 170 kilometers north of Manila -- as “parang Iraq (like Iraq)."

Deloso seems to confine such a description to what he and others say is the increased militarization in this town because of mining. But he may well also be describing the helter-skelter way mining is being conducted in the entire province, recalling the mayhem and lawlessness in Iraq. Ironically, according to local officials and ordinary Zambaleños, the situation can be traced largely to no less than Deloso’s mining policies. 

The governor himself says that Zambales has become a “battleground between big and small interests, national against local officials, with some intramurals between me and the mayor (of Sta. Cruz)." Yet he is unapologetic about the policies on mining he has crafted, even though lawyers and some local officials say the legality of these are, at the very least, suspect, especially those pertaining to small-scale mining. 

These are also why unearthing Zambales’s minerals (which include chromite and gold and are estimated to be worth billions of dollars) has turned the province into a virtual powder keg waiting to explode. 

Environment and Natural Resources Secretary Joselito ‘Lito’ Atienza has called Zambales “the most problematic province in terms of mining." 

 Laws bent, ignored

Zambales’s mining mayhem, however, is not only a template of how local governments should not manage the industry. It also reveals how national agencies like the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) are rendered inutile as laws are bent and manipulated to suit the needs of local officials. 

Confesses a mid-level DENR official when confronted with the situation in Zambales: “Our men just deal with small problems on the ground, like conflicts between small miners."

This is even though it was the DENR that issued the implementing rules and regulations for Republic Act 7076 or the 1991 People’s Small-Scale Mining Law. It is also the DENR that has direct supervision and control over some of the vital bodies that govern small-scale mining, which is aimed at helping generate income for the rural poor. 

These include the Provincial Mining and Regulatory Board (PMRB), a five-member body that is supposed to be headed by the regional director of the DENR’s Mines and Geosciences Bureau (MGB). It is the DENR’s implementing agency for the People’s Small-Scale Mining Program. Among other things, it is upon its recommendation that a small-scale mining contract is issued by the governor.

In addition, it is the DENR secretary who has “direct supervision and control over the (People’s Small-Scale Mining Program) and activities of small-scale miners" within the designated area. 

 Jobs, mines, power, violence 

Zambales is not new to mining. Acoje Mining dug for chromite in Sta Cruz for 75 years beginning in the 1930s. In 1934, Benguet Corporation began to extract chromite from the mountains of nearby Masinloc town, and continued doing so for half a century. In San Marcelino town, the Benguet-Dizon firm leveled mountains for gold, easing up only when Mt. Pinatubo erupted in 1991.

These days, there are at least eight mining firms with permits to conduct large-scale mining in Zambales. But they are no longer the only players on the block, and are in fact sometimes even being forced to share mining space with small-scale miners, courtesy of the capitol’s rather haphazard way of issuing its infamous 30-day mining permits.

Then again, it’s not only small-scale miners who have been caught in areas already committed to major mining operations. A3UNA Mining Corporation, a large-scale mining permit holder, has also been accused of straying into the sites of its fellow big companies – and far too many times at that. 

This has prompted the usually lax Provincial Mining and Regulatory Board (PMRB) to try reining in A3UNA, albeit with not much success. 

“We have issued several cease-and-desist orders against A3UNA," says a PMRB member, explaining that the orders were prompted by the company’s intrusion into mining areas owned by other groups. Yet every time an inspection team was sent by the capitol to investigate such complaints, says the PMRB member who declines to be named, policemen and soldiers had to act as escorts.

And with reason. Just last October, the firm’s guards traded gunfire with policemen accompanying the province’s Task Force Kalikasan, which was seeking confirmation regarding yet another complaint against A3UNA. 

Six months earlier, Filipinas Mining Corporation (FMC) had also written Environment Secretary Lito Atienza, alleging that A3UNA project manager Jaime Lazaro "and a group of about 30 persons including about 12 security guards and personal security detail armed with M16 automatic rifles" had forcibly entered and occupied its site. - Jaileen Jimeno, PCIJ

Source:http://www.gmanews.tv/story/170133/Mining-mayhem-triggers-eco-disaster-in-Zambales