Middle way on mining.

March 6th, 2012

As in the impeachment court, so it was at the recent mining forum in Makati City, where pro- and antimining advocates engaged in a heated face-off, capped by the sight of arguably the country’s most powerful businessman, Manny V. Pangilinan, losing his cool and calling the environmentalist-scion of one of the country’s most influential families, Gina Lopez, a liar.

We meant the concept of hearsay—in the impeachment court something treated with disdain, the testimony classified as such eventually getting thrown out and declared inadmissible. At the mining forum, words akin to hearsay were also present, but not as one of the bright minds in the room pointed it out: namely, that when Pangilinan and Lopez were trading barbs on the effect mining can have on rural communities, both of them, really, were mouthing second-hand testimony. Perhaps they’ve seen tangible evidence of it on their occasional visits to mining areas, but neither of them has actually lived there, to experience first-hand, in the raw, how it is to be at the receiving end of this wealth-producing but also injurious activity about which they were now at each other’s throats.

The right person to have challenged Pangilinan’s apologia for the mining sector was not Lopez, however well-intentioned or deep into the cause she might be. The right person should have been an actual inhabitant of any one of the country’s mining areas who could testify, in his or her own words, and certainly more eloquently than Lopez could ever manage or Pangilinan could ever hope to rebut, whether gouging huge swaths of the country inside out to extract the mineral riches said to be underneath, displacing residents and perhaps turning the land into a howling wilderness for good, would be all worth it.

But from the ranks of farmers, fishermen and tribal minorities, the marginal and destitute folk who have lived for generations in those remote, undeveloped areas where mining often occurs and that inevitably have to bear the brunt of its aftereffects, no one was at the forum to speak on their behalf. Because, as former elections commissioner and now Meralco management consultant Christian Monsod ruefully pointed out in his speech: “It is unfortunate that two major stakeholders on the issue of mining were not invited to speak today—the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples and the Department of Agriculture.”

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