Indigenous people can get more from mining, says mine exec

PAGADIAN CITY, Philippines—Indigenous communities can actually demand higher royalties or even become part owners of mining companies, a mining executive said here recently.

Speaking at a training program hosted by the Mindanao Peacebuilding Institute Foundation here last Thursday, Joel Alasco  TVI Resource Development (TVIRD) Phils. Inc.  said indigenous communities can demand to be paid 50 percent of the gross revenues of mining companies operating in areas officially recognized a part of a tribe’s ancestral domain.

“They can even ask to become stockholders of a mining company,” said Alasco, manager of TVIRD’s community relations and development office.

“The [host] indigenous community can demand as high as fifty percent (in royalties) or become stock holder of the firm. They can do it during the negotiation stage,” he said.

Alasco added, however, that mining companies may not be forced to grant such demands if they are losing money.

He said under the current set-up, mining companies “such as TVIRD, provide the minimum royalty of one percent of their gross revenues.”

This arrangement, he claimed, is what the mining law provides for.

But Onsino Mato, a Subanen tribal chieftain from Siocon, Zamboanga del Norte, said indigenous communities were at risk of being shortchanged because some firms, including TVIRD, were not transparent in how the royalties due indigenous peoples were calculated.

He said that TVIRD simply informed indigenous people that the money was already in their bank accounts.

“As to how the amount was arrived at, we never know,” Mato said, adding that in 2011, his group was supposed to get P59 million from TVIRD.

The amount, he said, was reduced after the company deducted certain expenses incurred by the company.

“The company made deductions such as excise tax payments and expenses for various road rehabilitation projects,” he said.