Oligarchs cause poverty

DIE HARD III
Herman Tiu Laurel
3/9/2012



The other spat that managed to outdo the “Whaa!” vs “Hear no Miriam” brouhaha in the Senate last week was the exchange between Manny Pangilinan (MVP) and Gina Lopez at a forum organized by the Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry (PCCI). That event at a plush hotel, clearly organized to push the corporate mining agenda, was where Lopez, as a self-appointed representative of the anti-large scale mining sector, made her point that such an approach destroys the beauty of nature. Opposite to that was MVP’s counter-argument, which said that since areas where large scale mining will be conducted are not tourist spots anyway, the most important thing to keep in mind is that “Mining is not the enemy, (but) poverty is.”

MVP and those lining up behind his arguments are obviously selling the idea that giant corporate mining will solve poverty in the Philippines. But, in the hundred-year history of large scale mining in the Philippines, has poverty decreased?

John Moldero was OIC Governor of Benguet in the immediate post-Edsa I government. Son of an American haciendero married to a native, John grew up very close to the locals of the Mountain Province. As founder of the globally famous Hobbit House, a regular habitué to many expats and a feature in Western films, which put the country on the world tourism map, John is also known for his unique contribution to Philippine hospitality and entertainment.

In the 2004 elections, John joined the campaign for FPJ. Tragically, he didn’t get to finish it. While driving on his scooter down Commonwealth Ave. to organize political marchers toward a rally, he was sideswiped by a delivery van and expired just minutes after being brought to a small nearby hospital.

John often waxed nostalgic when the subject of the Mountain Province arose and whenever the topic shifted to the issue of large vs small scale mining, he would leave us with this narrative:

“I grew up playing with the children of miners of the Mountain Province. There is a basic difference between the mining in Benguet and in Kalinga. The big mining companies of Benguet, such as the world-renowned Philex, employed thousands of miners and attracted foreign investors (even Mafia figures such as Meyer Lanky), leading Fortune magazine to report it as the “crown jewel” of the Mafioso’s holdings; but the miners remained as miners all their lives, as well as the generations of their children and grandchildren that followed. The difference in Kalinga is that mainly small mining took place there and the extraction of the rich lodes was gradual and sustainable, while mining families used much of their earnings for the education of their children. The second and third generations of Kalinga mining families are now doctors and lawyers, professionals produced by the small mining endeavors of these natives.”

Here lies the real argument against large-scale mining: Who benefits and how sustainable it really is.

Large scale miners promise to set up facilities, tailings ponds (really the size of giant lakes), and dams to contain poisonous and disastrous deluvial tailings for 20 years of mining operations. But what really begs to be asked is since they are expecting to exhaust the riches of those mines, taking all the wealth in a period short of a generation, what will be left for the people’s children and grandchildren?

All the benefits will simply accrue to a handful of foreign corporate interests, whereas the mining sites and communities will be left with only the ever present danger of a deluge of poisonous and utterly damaging flash floods of tailings that render hundreds, if not millions, of hectares (as in the Tampakan mines) uninhabitable for centuries.

So why are MVP and his cohorts (such as Peter Wallace) in such a hurry? Why are government mining officials so excited to pass laws and regulations that will allow this? Why should the nation accept a mere five, seven, or even 10 percent tax, plus some other short change, when such wealth should be 100 percent for the nation?

Besides that, we should ask: How bad can tailings disasters become? To date, there are 92 mine tailings disasters from all over the world significant enough to be listed on Internet sources. One of the worst is the Stava Valley disaster on July 19, 1985, an industrial catastrophe that cost 268 lives and 133 million euros in damage. Poisonous mud spread over 4.2 square kilometers, as aerial photos showed the horrendous extent of its permanent, irremediable damage.

The Foundation Stava 1985 was created in order to make sure that the innocent lives lost on that fateful day would not be in vain and that the world remembers the dangers and folly of gigantic scale mining.

The Philippines has its own Marcopper mine disaster in Boac, Marinduque, too, where 1.5 million cubic meters of toxic mine tailings spilled into five villages and buried Barangay Hinapula under six feet of muddy floodwaters, with residents poisoned with zinc and copper beyond tolerable limits.

Marcopper is estimated to have reaped a net profit of $7.3 billion from mining 30,000 tons of copper ore a day, but Marinduque still has a 71.9-percent poverty incidence and registered as the 14th poorest province in the country as of 2006.

While the corporate mining giant’s foreign mother companies have reaped billions, the country was left with thousands of hectares of poisoned lands that must rely on public resources (if any) to clean these up.

We do not have space enough to describe the horrors and economic injustice that large scale mining companies (that laugh all the way to their transnational banks) inflict on communities and nations while leaving a trail of disaster for the public to pick up in perpetuity.

So the problem is not poverty as poverty is not a cause but an effect--an effect of the greed, corrupting power, and avaricious machinations of oligarchs who want to devour and monopolize the wealth of nations.

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