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Shattered visions

By CHRISTINA MARIE C. LLANES/MMSU INTERN FOR NORDIS

The Fairy tale picture of dwarves merrily singing while digging their mines is a vision from my past. Glittering gold and other precious metals now seem pointless and unattractive to my eyes. Some people give so much importance to money and material things that they tend to forget the means of how these things are produced and sometimes they don’t even care.

Destructive mining has long been a burning issue to affected communities. This issue sounds like it is overrated by the media and yet it is still rampant in our country, especially in the Cordillera. We must be constantly reminded of its adverse effects to our environment and on our people. True, we gain from mining economically and politically, but at whose expense?

I was never aware of the mining situation in the Cordillera let alone the Philippines, until my classmates and I had the opportunity to visit an abandoned open-pit mine site in Barangay Loacan, Itogon, Benguet.

Visions of the seven miner dwarves of Snow White were flashing through my head during our 45-minute trip to Itogon. When we arrived, nothing could have prepared me for what was in front of my very eyes. The reality of the mining predicament of the Cordillera has stabbed through my numb and unaware being.

The mountain was stark naked of trees and plants. There was no water; the soil looked parched and crumbling. The air felt so thin that you could literally feel the sun burning on your skin.

“Are we still in Benguet or did we magically arrive in Mars?” was the first thought that crossed my mind.

That was when I saw IT. IT being the deep crater that was the aftermath of the Benguet Corporation’s (BC) open-pit mining operations called the “Antamok Gold Project”.

Open-pit mining or opencast mining, defined by the Grolier’s Encyclopedia, refers to a method of extracting rock or minerals from the earth leaving an open pit or burrow. The term is used to differentiate this form of mining from extractive methods that require tunneling deep into the earth’s bosom. It is a surface mining method in which overlying rock and soil is removed to expose the ore body, which is then drilled, blasted and loaded into trucks or railroad cars for haulage from the pit.

BC was not the only mining company that operated open-pit mines in Itogon.

“Actually, the Philex Mining Corporation started open-pit mining and used the subsidence area as backfill for the tunnels in the mid-70’s,” said Pastor Virgil Aniceto, spokesperson of the Alyansa dagiti Pesante iti Taeng-Kordilyera (APIT TAKO).

He said that BC started its experimental pit mining during the early 80’s and was in full-blast in 1983. Some operations in various barangays ceased during the early 90’s. As in barangay Ucab in 1992 after the mass arrest of about 500 residents who put up a vigorous resistance. The Antamok site we visited in Loacan stopped in 1996; and all operations were suspended in 1999.

Open-pit operations ceased because of the organized people’s resistance in several communities; depleted ore reserves; increasing production costs; and a surge in foreign exchange rates.

BC prefers open-pit mining to the conventional underground mining because it costs less and yields more.

Underground mining of BC’s scale required vast sums of money for both operations and maintenance: sustaining a huge labor force and maintaining a big maze of tunnels in good working order. Open-pit mines, on the other hand, requires a big starting capital but cheaper to run. This involves mechanized, low maintenance operations, according to a special report on the Antamok Gold Project.

Mining is a direct threat to the biological diversity of the town area. It has led to environmental destruction significantly reducing the food supply in the communities because of the depletion of water resources. The destruction of watershed areas protected by the indigenous peoples for generations has resulted in scarcity of water for agricultural production, etc.

“There is no longer enough water for irrigating what were once Itogon’s oldest rice fields,” according to Jill K. Cariño of the Cordillera Peoples Alliance (CPA).

When I asked Pastor Virgil what are the adverse effects of open-pit mining to the environment and to the residents of the communities and how it differentiates from conventional underground mining, he reiterated that both have the same effects. However, the former is more visible than the latter.

Open-pit mining has caused the denudation of the forest’s cover; skin allergies/diseases; noise pollution from the machines and blasting, air pollution due to the blasting; the poisoning of, their livelihood resources because of the dumping of mine wastes (which consists of chemicals like cyanide, mercury, lead, and manganese) in the tailings dam; and the displacement of the small scale miners from their livelihood sources.

Small-scale mining, I was told, has been practiced in the Cordillera for more than 1,000 years. Small-scale mining, as practiced in Itogon is a simple undertaking. It employs very little equipment and a great deal of manual labor. The miners’ only equipment are handheld hammers, pickaxes, spades, and crowbars. No chemical is used.

Presently, because of the tough competition a few small-scale miners dangerously choose to use mercury, cyanide, and blasting.

Faced by this reality and the hard cold facts, my fairy tale vision of dwarves’ gleaming gold is now pointless and ugly.

May we be constantly reminded and aware of how serious this situation is. We must do something to save our environment. For if not, there will be nothing left of the Cordillera but a dry lifeless crater. When that happens, our northern Luzon rivers will all run dry. #

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