More mine benefits for ‘lumad’ seen

PAGADIAN CITY—Indigenous communities can actually demand higher royalty or ask mining companies to be part owners of the mining firms, a mining executive said on Thursday.

Speaking before a peace-building training program hosted by  Mindanao Peacebuilding Institute Foundation here, Joel Alasco, of TVI Resource Development (TVIRD) Phils. Inc., said indigenous communities could demand to be paid 50 percent of the gross revenues of mining companies operating inside ancestral domain areas.

“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 50 percent [in royalty] or become stockholder of the firm. They can do it during the negotiation stage,” he said.

Alasco, however, said mining companies might not be forced to grant such demands if the firms are suffering from losses.

He said under the current scheme, mining companies “such as TVIRD, provide the minimum royalty of 1 percent of their gross revenues.”

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

But Onsino Mato, a Subanen tribal chieftain from Siocon, Zamboanga del Norte, said indigenous communities are at risk of being shortchanged because some firms, including TVIRD, are not transparent on how the royalty due to indigenous peoples that host mining areas is being computed.

He said what TVIRD does is only inform tribal people that the money is 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 amounts for other expenses that the mining firm incurred in its operations.

“The company made deductions such as excise tax payment and expenses for various road rehabilitation projects,” he said. Tito Fiel, Inquirer Mindanao