Senate probers asked: Mining or food security?

Farmers, environmentalists, scientists and academicians yesterday trooped to the Senate to hand in a petition demanding a halt to mining in their provinces.

“We should decide—mining or food? They don’t mix,” Rina Galang of the Green Convergence for Safe Food and Sustainable Development told reporters after a hearing by the committee on agriculture and food. “We cannot belittle the threat of mining to food security.”

Senator Francis Pangilinan, committee chairman, listened to the groups’ concerns in the nearly four-hour hearing. But in the end, he rejected taking steps toward a mining ban and instead condemned “irresponsible mining (as) a grave threat to our efforts in attaining food security.”

Gina Lopez of the Save Palawan Movement, a multisectoral organization of some 200 groups, disputed Pangilinan’s assertion. “There is no such thing as responsible mining, whether small-scale or large-scale,” she declared.

She added in a press conference after the hearing, “Mining is really not good for food security and agriculture. We are endangering our food supply due to the greed of a few.”

She said no area in the country had ever experienced an acceptable balance between the supposed economic benefits of mining and the health, safety and overall welfare of its people.

“Can you show me one place, just one place?” she asked.

Lopez’s group has been trying to gather 10 million protest signatures in a bid to show popular support for its cause and thus persuade the government to stop mining in metal-rich Palawan.

Pangilinan said the Department of Agriculture should conduct an inventory of all “vulnerable farming and fishing communities because of mining activities.”

“I am not against mining per se, but as we saw and heard today, irresponsible mining is a grave threat to our efforts in attaining food security,” he said.

“Clearly, there is a need to address the loopholes in the regulation and practices of the mining companies that operate in the country. We cannot sacrifice our food security for the sake of tapping the potential of an industry that obviously needs further evaluation based on data that we have received today.”

For his part, the head of the Chamber of Mines of the Philippines, lawyer Ronald R.S. Recidoro, said in a phone interview that mineral production was being closely monitored by the Mines and Geosciences Bureau to ensure that public welfare was protected.

“There is an existing process where companies that want to mine are required to make baseline studies on the environment and their prospective host communities,” he said.

Recidoro said that from a tax angle and from an environmental perspective, the government should focus more attention into regulating small-scale mining, since its operators were at present not monitored.

“The government would do well to implement R.A. 7076 since it will place small-scale mining under the supervision of the DENR (Department of Environment and Natural Resources) together with large-scale mining. This way there is a common monitoring body and we can weed out those companies that do large-scale mining while masquerading as small-scale miners.”

Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources Assistant Director Benjamin Tabios Jr. said separately that while mining might be harmful in some ways to agriculture, the output “of much of these mining activities enter into agriculture.”

He cited as an example iron, which he noted was a basic metal for producing agricultural and fisheries equipment such as farm tools, motor pumps, vessels and engines.

“Mining, if done properly, can be an engine of growth also to agriculture and fisheries,” Tabios said.