People’s Mining Bill refiled

An environmental group   on Tuesday   expressed support for the re-filing of the People’s Mining Act, urging the Duterte administration to prioritize the proposed measure’s enactment into law.

“As the People’s Mining Bill is re-filed in Congress once again, it is truly high time not just to suspend erring mining companies but to decisively pass a new policy that will end the vicious cycle of resource plunder, environmental destruction, and people’s suffering,” said Clemente Bautista, national coordinator of the Kalikasan People’s Network for the Environment, in a press statement.

House Bill (HB) 171 or the People’s Mining Act aims for the “appropriate utilization [and] sound management” of the country’s mineral resource in order to achieve national industrialization and agricultural modernization.

The bill was first proposed in 2011. It was refiled by one of its co-authors, Bayan Muna party-list Rep. Carlos Zarate, who is also the chairman of the House Committee on Natural Resources.

Bautista criticized the existing Mining Act of 1995, which requires companies to pay only two-percent income tax while “allowing the wholesale plunder of our country’s natural resources and inflicting massive human rights violations against mining-affected communities.”

“The passage of the PMB will radically reorient our mining industry from being profit oriented and insufficiently regulated towards a framework based on people’s needs, environmental safety, and genuine national industrialization and development,” he said.

Bautista said under the proposed measure, the government shall receive more than the current gross revenues shares from development and utilization of mineral resources.

Mineral operations within ancestral domains will require companies to allot at least 10 perent of the gross revenues as royalty to the indigenous communities, he said.   Jaehwa Bernardo,   INQUIRER.net   trainee