Home ›

OFWs in Italy take stand vs 'irresponsible' mining

By atm.admin - Posted on January 15th, 2010

by Jocelyn Ruiz, ABS-CBN Europe News Bureau | 01/12/2010 1:18 PM

ITALY –Filipinos based in Italy are ready to help farmers and
Palawan’s indigenous people against irresponsible mining and other
forms of destruction of the environment.

“Dapat suportahan ang campaign na ito against the irresponsible
mining. Ang consequence nito ay masyadong long term irreversible,” said
Msgr. Jerry Bitoon.

As this developed, Italian anthropologist Danilo Novellino is also
spearheading a signature campaign to appeal to Malacañang and the
Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) to do something
about their concern.

“What we are doing at the moment is that we are collecting thumb
marks and signatures for a petition to be sent to Malacañang, President
Gloria Macapagal [Arroyo] and to Secretary [Lito] Atienza of the DENR
to let the politicians know that Filipinos in Europe ay tutulong sa
problema ng pilipinas,” Novellino said.

Novellino recently held the 2nd batch of the leadership and social entrepreneurship training in Italy.

He spent 20 years in the Philippines documenting the life and
culture of farmers and indigenous peoples in Palawan. According to him,
miners and illegal loggers are big problems to farmers. Irresponsible
miners build companies that ruin the lands, while illegal loggers
damage the forest which they depend on for daily sustenance.

The anthropologist believes that OFWs play a big role, particularly when they are united.

“The voices of these people in Italy, England, America are very
powerful, they can make a difference. And also the other message is, we
have to pay a lot of money for lawyers just to support a legal fight
against irresponsible mining. To pay lawyers in the Philippines is
expensive, that’s why farmers, katutubo (tribes)--these people,
concerned citizens--they need some economic support to lead the legal
struggle,” he said.

Filipinos abroad are now preparing to donate 1 Euro to support the campaign and the affected tribes.

To further drive his point, Novellino showed a short film to OFWs
that shows a Palawan board member disagreeing with the fact that mining
will bring economic gains to the province.

Palawan is one of the best tourist spots in the Philippines and is included in the best islands in Asia.

Meanwhile, Novellino will continue his campaign to preserve the
environment in Palawan and help the indigenous people and farmers by
appealing for help from OFWs in Europe and America.

Bookmark/Search this post with:
Your rating: None
Tagged:

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.

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
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.

More information about formatting options

Image CAPTCHA
Copy the characters (respecting upper/lower case) from the image.