Semirara Mine Tragedy: A Question of Priorities

A collapsed wall left five miners dead and five missing when a landslide hit Semirara mine in Antique just before midnight on Wednesday last week.

Two more landslides would smite Semirara in the days to follow, following another avalanche on February 14 on lands clearly weakened after decades of open-pit mining.
Semirara Mining Corporation is the largest and only coal producer in the country, chaired by David Consunji, the country’s fifth richest man as of last year, and Isidro Consunji, its CEO. Semirara, inc. has regularly been awarded a place among the top 30 publicly-listed companies in corporate governance. It also has huge investments in coal-powered power plants in a rapidly changing climate – both in politics and the biosphere – where world governments and chief executives alike are thinking twice about the relative merits of fossil fuels.

Rappler estimates this is the third major mining incident in half a year, after the tailings pond of the Philex-run Padcal mine in Benguet burst its banks to pour tonnes of waste directly into Balog creek, later Agno river and San Roque dam – in the country’s worst such accident ever to occur, by sheer volume of waste. Another spill by Citinickel Mines and Development Corp in Narra, Palawan has affected irrigation canals and fish ponds along Pinagduguan river. Both have threatened to render neighbouring waterways biologically dead, affecting hundreds of hectares of local farmland and livelihoods.

But the Semirara, Padcal, and Citinickel incidents are, in fact, just few of literally hundreds that happen day in and day out in more or less subtle ways. Elsewhere, all are products of an industry that has left a trail of ecological degradation and economic depravity in its wake here and across the globe. Where extractive industries are placed at the heart of national development policy, graft and corruption, elite capture of wealth, toxic waste dumping, tailings leaks, labour abuses, blatant land grabs – often in cahoots with local government agencies – human rights violations and extrajudicial killings against anti-mining activists by military officials and the hired goons of private companies are the norm.

In return, the large-scale mining industry has contributed barely 1-2% a year to the country’s GDP – a substantial share of which goes to line the profit margins of big players –and less than 1% of overall employment (mining is a capital-intensive enterprise). With profits repatriated abroad or captured by elite interests, it has done little to advance national industrialization or sustainable, long-term economic development. Regions dependent on revenues on mining or other extractive industries for the bulk of their income also tend to be the country’s poorest and most underdeveloped.

The whole dire history of the Philippine mining industry, including ‘accidents’ like this one – often blamed by companies on nature (force majeure) – occur at the intersection of people, planet, and profit. They are, above all, a question of power: where nominally democratic governments consistently favour the latter when faced with a thick wad of cold hard cash. They fit into a broader, global pattern of land grabbing and unrestrained resource extraction that happen at the expense of local populations and indigenous peoples. They are also a reflection of government priorities, as evidenced in the steady liberalization of the mining industry at the behest of the Philippine Chamber of Mines, the 1995 Mining Act, and the current administration’s long-term national development strategy: no more than a carry-over from the neoliberal policies of the former Arroyo administration.

Partido Lakas ng Masa and other progressive political parties and environmental groups demand:

• Fair and adequate compensation to be paid out to the miners and their families.
• The scrapping of the 1995 Mining Act, in favor of the Alternative Minerals Management Bill or the People’s Mining Bill (HB 4315). These provide for proper land use planning, democratically-run minerals management councils and support for small scale, artisanal mining, while setting clear limits to the growth of unsustainable resource extraction in the form of no-mining zones in ecologically-sensitive areas.
• A shift away from private, profit-driven resource extraction in view of the future re-nationalization of crucial industries, including large-scale mining.
• A shift away from an economic strategy built on resource extraction and exportation toward a needs-based, ecologically sustainable and people-centered approach to development.

Released by CJ Chanco, PLM media officer

Source: https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=378563695574319&id=100002620765953

Human Rights Online Philippines does not hold copyright over these materials. Author/s and original source/s of information are retained including the URL contained within the tagline and byline of the articles, news information, photos etc.