Thousands of Filipino children, some as young as 9 years old, risk their lives by working in illegal, small-scale gold mines under terrifying conditions and the government has not done enough to protect them, a human rights group said on Wednesday.
A Human Rights Watch report said the children work in unstable 25-meter-deep pits or underwater along coastal shores or rivers, processing gold with mercury, a toxic metal that can cause irreversible health damage.
Those who dive for gold stay underwater for several hours at a time in 10-meter-deep shafts, receiving air through a tube attached to an air compressor.
The New York-based Human Rights Watch said it interviewed 135 people, including 65 child miners from 9 to 17 years of age, in eastern Camarines Norte and Masbate provinces during field research in 2014 and 2015.
3.2M child laborers
The Philippines had nearly 5.5 million working children in 2011, according to government statistics, with 3.2 million of them considered child laborers because they worked long hours or in hazardous environments.
“Filipino children are working in absolutely terrifying conditions in small-scale gold mines,” said Juliane Kippenberg, associate children’s rights director at Human Rights Watch and author of the report.
“The Philippine government prohibits dangerous child labor, but has done very little to enforce the law,” Kippenberg said.
Labor Secretary Rosalinda Baldoz told The Associated Press that the government was working to stamp out child labor at the village level with programs to keep children in school, provide them with healthcare, and give livelihoods to poor families, as well as push efforts to rescue child laborers and prosecute those who violate anti-child labor laws.
Mary Grace Riguer, executive director of the government’s Institute for Labor Studies, said the government was trying to provide employment help to parents so they could afford to send their children to school instead of having them work.
Fear in the shaft
Several boys quoted in the report described the fear they felt when they went down a dark, deep shaft for the first time.
Dennis, now 14, said he was 13 when he first went under water.
“Sometimes, it feels like your eardrum is going to explode. I stay underwater for one to two hours. [Once] the man above me gave me the warning that something was wrong with the compressor, so I could immediately go up,” the report quoted him as saying.
“Sometimes if the machine leaks, I smell the fumes. Sometimes I feel dizzy because it’s oil,” he added.
“Compressor mining,” as it is known locally, puts adult and child miners at risk of drowning, decompression sickness and skin infections.
Such small-scale mines can be found in more than 30 of the 81 provinces in the Philippines, employing 200,000 to 300,000 people from mostly poor, rural communities, the report said. Businessmen finance the operations.
Unlicensed operations
Although the government can designate specific “people’s mining areas,” the majority of the small-scale mines operate without a license.
Human Rights Watch urged the government to enforce an order banning mercury use and compressor mining, adding it needed to develop a strategy to stop the use of children in the gold mining industry.