They have lived in poverty for long and would rather embrace the valley of death than leave the gold-rich mountains of Pantukan town in Compostela Valley.
In the aftermath of the latest deadly landslide in Pantukan, Mines and Geosciences Bureau (MGB) Director Leo Jasareno on Friday acknowledged the difficulty of convincing the small-scale miners to abandon their quest.
The landslide was a “preventable” tragedy, Jasareno said, but telling the settlers to leave was easier said than done.
Asked what kept them in the area, he replied: “Poverty. The glitter of gold.”
“I asked them before: Why don’t you want to leave when you know that you could die here? One miner said to me: If we leave, we will also die because there are no jobs. We have a fighting chance here,” he said.
Social issue
“It’s a social issue,” Jasareno noted.
The settlers in Pantukan are mostly subsistence miners, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) said.
According to Jasareno, a miner could earn between P2,000 and P2,500 per gram of gold. One miner could find as much as 10 grams of gold in a day’s work, he said.
“The area continues to act as a magnet to as many as 200,000 individuals during a gold rush,” Environment Secretary Ramon Paje said.
Jasareno said the gold mines in Pantukan were illegal and did not have the permits from the local and national governments.
After a side of the mountain collapsed last year, the provincial government issued an ordinance banning small-scale mining and paving the way for Minahang Bayan, a cooperative-run operation. The local government gave the miners a year to leave or form into a Minahang Bayan.
The DENR said tragedies in small-scale mines, where miners work under unsafe conditions, were bound to happen.
Gold boom
The DENR said it had anticipated a boom in the gold trade due to the high price of the precious metal in the global market. About 60 percent of the gold in the Philippines is mined by small-scale miners, industry data said.
Some 200 miners were working illegally in the latest landslide area, which is under the jurisdiction of Napnapan Mineral Resources Corp.
Jasareno said the company had asked the DENR permission to evict the illegal miners in November last year.
Jasareno said town officials and residents knew the risks in the area.
After the April 2011 landslide, the DENR sent several letters to Pantukan Mayor Juan Cipriano Celso Sarenas, notifying him of the hazards in the 13 barangays of his municipality.
Helplessness
Another letter to the mayor dated September 2011 listed the areas that should be monitored due to their high susceptibility to landslide and flooding.
Sarenas, according to Jasareno, acknowledged that he could not order an evacuation by himself and that he needed the national government to intervene.
Jasareno explained that the soil of Pantukan had become too weak to withstand mining activities. “The rocks there have become weathered. It has softened over the years,” he said.
The area is also rugged and steep. According to the MGB official, the steeper the slope of a mountain, the higher the landslide incident.
Cracks and fissures have been observed in the mountain ridges. They could easily cave in from heavy movements or pressure, Jasareno said.
He explained that the mining activities that loosened up the soil below and the processing plants erected in the mining enclaves could have contributed to the landslide.
“There are structures in the slopes like houses and processing plants. These contributed to the heavy weight,” he said.
Degrading topsoil
The method for mining gold also helped weaken the ground. The mercury used to extract gold is disposed haphazardly, contaminating and degrading the topsoil and the water, Jasareno said.
Aggravating the problem, the rains in eastern Mindanao, of which Compostela Valley is part, loosened the soil, according to officials.
Science Undersecretary Graciano Yumul Jr., a geologist, said weather reports showed that Compostela Valley had “light rains” prior to the landslide.
However, the rains lasted for several days, further slackening the mountain soil, Yumul said.