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Summary of Findings and Recommendations, "Philippines: Mining or Food?"

By atm.admin - Posted on February 9th, 2009
"Philippines: Mining or Food?"
Summary of Main Findings and Recommendations
by
Robert Goodland and Clive Wicks
of the Working Group on Mining in the Philippines (WGMP)


Main Findings of the Report

  • Deforestation and mining have contributed to the worst food crisis in Philippine history.
  • The Philippines has changed from being a rice exporter into the world's biggest importer of rice (ex. 500,000 tonnes were  purchased from Vietnam in January 2009)
  • Rice imports drain foreign exchange; this will intensify with current mining plans. Current poverty levels are unacceptable;  mining exacerbates poverty and creates few jobs.
  • Conflict over mining plans between local/ regional and national government is escalating. Mining increases environmental damage, both short and long term (centuries). It is also generating and exacerbating conflict and human rights violations.  
  • Indigenous people and the poor bear the brunt of such damage.
  • Good laws and regulations (e.g. FPIC) exist, but are generally not enforced.
  • The cumulative economic , social and cultural impacts of mining have not been adequately assessed or addressed. This is evident in relation to food security.
  • Mining cannot be the engine for sustainable development in the Philippines.


Recommendations of this Report to Stakeholders:

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COMMENT RULES:

Hi everyone,

I'm the national coordinator of Alyansa Tigil Mina (ATM), the owner of this site.

We will always respect views and opinions posted on this site, as much as we encourage open discussion and intelligent debate on the issue of mining. ATM has its stand on this issue very clearly, and we welcome the comments from those who do not agree with us.

However, we have observed that in the past few days, this forum has gone way beyond acceptable behavior of netiquette.

I will request and strongly encourage all posters to at least follow the following rules:

1. Be civil. Basic courtesy and privacy norms should be practised by posters in this forum. Make your mom at least proud by showing you still remember to be polite, even if you're not required to say "po" or "opo" in every post you make. We wouldn't mind that either, if you do so. Then again, I am assuming here that you're already an adult.

2. Personal attacks will not be tolerated. This also applies to flaming. Just in case you don't know what flaming is, its deliberately insulting or personally ranting against a poster (or a thread) simply because you are losing the arguments.

3. Avoid being anonymous. Since you have enough time to post long comments, you would at least have a few seconds to type even an alias. You also help people conclude that you are not a paid hack from a PR firm by Intex (or any other mining company)

4. Do not shout in the forums. Do not use ALL CAPS in your posts. A single exclamation point should also suffice.

We will observe the forum in the next few days. Should these rules be disregarded, we will transform this into a minimally-moderated forum. We hope we will avoid the situation that we will decide to make this a closely and strictly moderated forum. We value everyone's insights so much.

We'll check up again on this new rules after a short while. Of course, we expect the Intex ECC to be revoked in a few days. In this case, I suspect that the "excitement" in this thread would have died down.

Jaybee Garganera
National Coordinator
ATM
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