Foreign environmental experts recommend repeal of Mining Law

QUEZON CITY, Philippines — According to environmental scientist Dr Robert Goodland and Mr Clive Montgomery Wicks, the Philippine government should repeal the Mining Law and immediately and replace it with legislation which is consistent with the Philippine constitution, applies the Precautionary Principle and adequately protects human rights, indigenous peoples rights and the environment while regulating mining for public interest.

The Mining Law otherwise known as Republic Act 7942, was passed in 1995 and has since been the subject of much criticism from major sectors of Philippine society.

The experts made the recommendation in their report, Philippines: Mining or Food, which looked at six proposed mining sites and examined their potential impact on the ecology and food security of the Philippines which was launched February 4 at Balay Kalinaw in University of the Philippines Diliman campus.

Dr Goodland, who worked as a senior environmental adviser for the World Bank for 23 years and Mr Clive Montgomery Wicks, who worked for the Worldwide Fund for Nature and is currently Vice-Chair of the IUCN Commission on Environmental, Economic and Social Policy (IUCN-CEESP), were commissioned by the London-based Working Group on Mining in the Philippines February 2008 to visit the country in order to investigate more fully, document and map some key sites targeted for mining.

According to the authors of the report, the existing Mining Law "favors foreign or multinational corporations (MNCs) with benefits such as tax holidays and repatriation of income to their home countries and is economically disadvantageous to the Philippine people as the Philippine state has no share as owner in trust of the resources."

"In addition mining MNCs are allowed access to vast tract of land under the financial and technical assistance agreement scheme that accompanies the act, leaving little rights to so-called "surface owners" whom MNCs often forcefully evict from their lands," the report states.

"The report confirms what indigenous peoples, environmentalists and other sectors of civil society have been saying all along: that the Mining Act of 1995 is hopelessly skewed in favor of large, foreign mining interests at the expense of local communities and the national interest," said Judith Pasimio, of the Legal Rights and Natural Resources Center (LRC), a legal and policy research NGO asserted. "The flaws in the current mining law cannot be remedied by mere amendments. It must be scrapped now before it does even more damage."

LRC is currently drafting an alternative mining legislation to replace the existing law. (Rovik Obanil)