Mining-related deaths, destruction haunt celebration of Mine Safety Week

Mining-related deaths, destruction haunt celebration of Mine Safety Week

“With the celebration of Mine Safety Week, the mining industry is portraying itself as a socially responsible industry, but in truth it is nothing but a self-serving, destructive and exploitative industry.” – Kakay Tolentino, a Dumagat spokeswoman of Katribu Partylist

By MARYA SALAMAT
Bulatlat.com

MANILA – “There is life in mining,” said the oft-repeated ad of a mining company. But life for whom?
On the first day of the “celebration” of Mine Safety Week, representatives of Filipino farmers and indigenous peoples, scientists and environmentalists, expressly distanced themselves from the government celebrations and instead held protest rallies across the Philippines against what they described as liberalized, plunderous mining, which also often comes with brutal militarization.

In Manila, the protesters marched to the Mendiola Bridge (now Chino Roces) and held a brief program there. They condemned “the continuing environmentally destructive impact to communities and key ecosystems attributed to foreign mining companies.” They unfurled an image of what they said as real “righteous path,” a paved road to national industrialization and an end to destructive, extractive and largely foreign-controlled mining.

The activists reminded Aquino that the 29th anniversary of the first recorded mining disaster in the Philippines coincided with the opening of Mine Safety Week.


Intensifying people’s resistance to mining

Long before the much-criticized Mining Act of 1995, on November 8, 1982, the walls of the tailings pond of the Maricalum Mining in Negros crumbled and collapsed, unleashing a torrent of million tons of mine wastes on the river system and agricultural fields of Negros, recalled Clemente Bautista, national coordinator of Kalikasan, an environmentalist group.

Critics of ‘plunderous large-scale mining” arrive at Mendiola Bridge. (Photo by Marya Salamat / bulatlat.com)

The incident, said Bautista, “poisoned the rivers, submerged the farmers’ crops and inundated with toxic wastes thousands of hectares of farmlands in Negros. It drove away thousands of hungry families from the towns of Sipalay and Cauyan in Negros.”
“With the celebration of the Mine Safety Week, the mining industry is portraying itself as a socially responsible industry, but the truth is, it is nothing but a self-serving, destructive and exploitative industry,” said Kakay Tolentino, a Dumagat and spokeswoman of the Katribu Partylist.

“President Benigno Aquino III, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) and the Chamber of Mines wish to portray the current state of mining in the Philippines as responsible and nurturing both for the environment and the citizens, but it is just a cover-up,” said Natalie Pulvinar of Advocates for Science and Technology for the People (AGHAM).

In celebrating Mine Safety Week, “Aquino just wants to make a show as if the Mining Act of 1995 is still good and functioning despite protests and the very ugly effects of large-scale mining,” Pulvinar added..... MORE

Source:  Bulatlat.com

URL: http://bulatlat.com/main/2011/11/09/mining-related-deaths-destruction-haunt-celebration-of-mine-safety-week/