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i agree with you and what your fighting for.. but as long as our government including our president disagree with this program this will be nothing…☺fight for the rights of Palawan☺… we are its hope… don’t let palawan be like Zambales… =>ramon14///
♣go full power!!!♣
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Batas News Web
March 3, 2007
LETTERS FROM PORT MORESBY
ALFREDO P HERNANDEZ
Larap – Tale of an abandoned mining community
Left photo: The swamp where the mine tailings from Ok Tedi gold mine in Papua New Guinea were being dumped. Right photo: Map showing the mining areas in Larap where Trans-Asia is proposing to operate. The area enclosed by red ink covers 885 hectares. The town of Jose Panganiban is seen on the right of the map. – Map courtesy of Trans-Asia website.
Left photo: The members of the Jose Panganiban Sangguniang Bayan discussing the proposed re-opening of the Larap mines. – Photo courtesy of Trans-Asia website. Right: A coconut farming family working on their copra production.
ABOUT two weeks ago, the Philippine media reported on the tensed situation at a copper and zinc mining site in Rapu-Rapu, Albay, a province in the Bicol Peninsula.
This was after the Philippine government finally allowed Lafayette Philippines, Inc (LPI) to proceed with its million- dollar operations following the miner’s compliance towards the end of last year of preconditions set by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR). Among the measures imposed included the strengthening of the dam system to prevent toxic spills from occurring again.
The mining glitches occurred on October 11 and 31, 2005 involving two mine tailings spills which immediately drew sharp protests and condemnation from the villagers and environmentalists, to which the government quickly responded by suspending the mining operations.
The damage control exercise cost the miner, whose mother company Lafayette Mining Ltd is based in Australia, a whooping US$60 million.
The government’s move to lift the company’s suspension had caused ripples across the country’s mining sector because of the message it was sending to prospective foreign investors, who then slowed down to take a wait-and-see attitude on what was to happen next.
Lafayette was given 120 days of test run to prove that it is capable of responsible mining.
Apparently, LPI succeeded and during the test run period, it produced 1,400 tons of copper concentrate and 1,500 tons of zinc concentrate with a total value of US$2.5 million.
However, the villagers living near the mining site continued to have misgivings about the government’s wisdom when it allowed the miner to go on with its business of extracting the minerals and dumping its wastes under what it called “controlled environment”.
The local people were concerned and continued to be afraid of the risks posed by the mining operations, especially during natural disasters, which may threaten fishing, their main source of livelihood.
Although the mining company had created about 1,000 jobs in Rapu-Rapu, something the management was crowing about in the media, the whole village alongside the environmentalist groups believed that such employment would not in anyway do any good to protect their environment. In fact, they believed those jobs would not compensate the harm the mining operations would impact on the ecology in the long-term.
Very clearly, the villagers and the soldiers of nature are looking into the future.
And unfortunately, the future is something that has not been seen clearly by miners in many parts of the world.
For instance, on the high island of Bougainville, in Papua New Guinea, open pit copper mining until the 1980s had resulted in the discharge of about 150,000 tonnes of rock wastes and tailings daily. The tailings had spilled down into a headwater valley of the Kawerong River and into the Jaba valley, where they had spread out across the valley floor, destroying large areas of rainforests and killing fish in the river.
t its mouth, the Jaba had built a new delta out into Empress Augusta Bay, and sand and gravel had been spread northwards along the shore as a pro-graded beach. It was likely that the mining of copper and gold from the mountainous headwater regions of the Ok Tedi, a tributary of the Fly River, also in Papua New Guinea, would generate waste material to augment the already large load of the Ok Tedi, and increase deposition on the Fly delta.
But natural rates of sediment yield here are so high that the effects are not expected to be as drastic as on Bougainville or in New Caledonia, an island-country in the Pacific.
The Bougainville gold mine was shut down in late 1980s after the islanders and the rebels took over the mine and its properties. The islanders, who had remained poor despite the many years of productive gold operations, felt that the miner was only robbing them of their gold and copper and that they were not getting their fair share of the business.
In my hometown Jose Panganiban in Camarines Norte, also in the Bicol Peninsula, iron ore mining had led to siltation and pollution of the Larap River, just about 10 kilometers away from the town. This had adversely affected the fishery resources of that river and of Larap Bay off its mouth, which extends up to the Mambulao Bay whose gentle waves lapped on the shore of Parang, a barrio where our family’s ancestral home still stands these days.
The Lawis River, in western Luzon, has been similarly affected by chromite mining; the Taft River on Samar island by iron ore extraction in its headwater regions; and the Abra River, also on Luzon, by gold, silver, and copper mining in its upper tributaries. In each case, the river load is being augmented by the inflow of silt and sand.
The iron ore deposits in Larap, still considered the richest in the entire Philippines, was operated by the Philippine Iron Mines (PIM) from the early 1930s to early 1970s. Those days, PIM was the biggest supplier of iron ore to Japan whose vessels had become a permanent fixture at the mine’s wharf in most part of the year.
I HAVE KNOWN Larap and its vicinities like the palm of my hand. I went to the mine camp at least twice a week during the early 1960s (when I was in the grade school) to bring lunch for my father who worked as a mechanic, and on weekends, to watch with my mother double-feature movies in its popular movie house.
My father’s employer was one of the mine’s contractors whose business was to haul iron ore extracts from the mining site to the crushing facilities on the other side of the camp just close to the wharf. To get there, I would take the ALATCO bus whose trip began from its terminal at the poblacion. This bus would always be loaded with miners who were in a rush to catch up with their work shifts that usually kept them in tunnels that snaked 500 feet under the mineral-loaded ground.
Larap, a barrio just 10 kilometers from the poblacion, was not only a mining community that covered more than 800 hectares. It was also a place of affluence simply because of the families whose luxuries were closely linked to the mines that provided them good-paying employment. These migrant families who lived within the mining camp were provided modest-to-luxurious accommodation by the company. Because of this, they were looked up to by their native workmates and people who lived outside of the mine camp, including those who came from the poblacion. In short, they were the “elite” in our town.
Many of my classmates in high school, including Aurora, who was my first crush, lived at the mine camp and came to school in public transport in which the fare was paid for by the mining company. Aurora’s dad was the mining company’s lawyer – a well-known and respected person – who originally came from Ilocos. I had always thought that my classmates were lucky to have parents with good-paying jobs at the mines. In fact, I was a bit envious whenever I saw them at the canteen during class break while having snacks – a little luxury that my mother told me not to have.
Townspeople had simply referred to the mine camp residents as “Taga-Larap”, a term that spoke a lot. Ironically, majority of these families whose heads were either engineers or experts of some sort were not natives of Jose Panganiban. They came from different parts of the Philippines – from Manila, Visayas and upper Luzon – making Larap a virtual melting pot. A self-contained community, it had a movie house much better than what we had in town, a well-equipped hospital, an efficient water and power service, a classy shopping center and wet market better than what we had in the poblacion, complete facilities for elementary school, a “For Members Only” recreation center and many more.
The young adults from these families had their own exclusive society and during Larap’s fiesta, they would normally take the center stage at the plaza to show-off the latest dancing steps and other crazy things imported from Manila. We, the youths from the town, would take a bus ride to Larap just to see them do their thing.
The “Taga-Larap” crowd lived a luxurious life as if tomorrow would never come.
Then one day, miner Philippine Iron Mines decided to call it a day.
The price of iron in the world market plunged and commercial grade ore deposits were now in deeper locations that required underground extraction. In short, the mining enterprise became uneconomic although there were still iron ore reserves beneath Larap’s surface of about 49 million tons, an estimate made in 1971 shortly before PIM abandoned the mine. (Other areas outside Larap are potential hosts of mineable deposits. Meanwhile, small-scale mining activities are currently taking place in areas around Larap which extract high-grade ores exposed at or near survace.)
In a flash, the economy within the mine camp collapsed. Mining contractors pulled out of the camp as there were no more business to do, leaving hundreds of migrant mining families with no source of livelihood. The farmers and fishermen who live on the outskirts of the mine camp suddenly lost a flourishing market for their fish and produce. Little by little, businesses at the mine camp became unprofitable as there were less and less customers coming to shop. Those families who lived in luxuries were suddenly holding the proverbial empty bag, obviously unprepared for this economic downturn.
Their children in high school – a number of them my classmates – were forced to quit as their schooling had become a big financial burden. And not before long, the “the Taga-Larap” families started to bail out of the mine camp to look for new fortune that would keep them afloat in some faraway places. Others returned to their native homes across the country to start a new life. Those with no home to return to, stayed put and suffered.
My father, who was a farmer before he learned how to fix a vehicle and land a job at the mine, returned to his small coconut farm in Paracale, some 20 kilometers from Jose Panganiban, and became full-time coconut farmer again. This little plantation of his ensured our family’s survival and sent me and my siblings through high school.
JUST BEFORE I came to Papua New Guinea for good in 1993, I visited my hometown. In the course of looking for a “katulong” who would give my wife company at home, I happened to go to a barrio that sits next to a massive mangrove area. This I did on the suggestion of a close relative who knew of a young girl looking for a “housemaid job”. To reach this barrio whose name I could no longer recall now, I had to drive across the former mine camp of Larap.
For the first time in more than 20 years since the mine shut down in the early 1970s, I came face to face with the mine camp of my youth.
Looking around the grey, lifeless, vast space that surrounded me, I got the shock of my life. What I was looking at was a place forsaken by God, reminiscent of Mel Gibson’s first “Mad Max” movie where a slight whip of wind would create a giant cloud of dust billowing into the sky.
The truth is that when I drove through what should have been a road leading to the barrio on the other side of the camp where I could meet our potential “katulong”, my car struggled through six-inch deep of powdery dust, not sand, but powdery dust, that exploded into a thick cloud from under the vehicle upon contact with the tires, making me see no farther than 10 feet ahead. As I drove through, my car felt as if it was trail-blazing a new path that was being opened for the first time, thanks to its craggy, moon-like surface that proved to be an endless punishment for me and my passengers that included my mother, although this was where the mini-buses plied everyday, carrying barrio people who sold their farm goods in the town market.
During its heydays, the mine camp was covered with all sorts of structures mainly made of steels and GI sheets and some timber; it was groaning 24 hours a day, seven days a week while it spewed out precious iron ore from the bowels of the earth, minerals that made Philippine Iron Mines world-famous. And on the mine camp’s fringes next to the Larap Bay stood the self-contained, little affluent community of Larap, a name that had become a by-word all over the Bicol Peninsula.
On that day when I first set my foot on this forsaken community after being away for almost a lifetime, I felt bad, having realised that this place will never be the same. The camp’s building structures were no more, except for the useless steel beams that were abandoned as well as skeletons of a few trees that somehow managed to survive a short-live existence only to dry up over the years. The grayish, desert-like terrain of the main mining camp was only interrupted by sporadic islands of equally grayish “cogon” and “talahib” grass that I thought had covered an area of more than 200 hectares and stretched up to the edge of the Larap Bay, which was now as good as dead from being silted up by million tons of mine tailings that poured into the bay for 40 years.
About two hundred meters from where I stopped my car to have a look was the famous open mine pit – a massive hole with an opening of over two kilometers wide and depth of about one kilometer, so deep that a fighter jet of the Philippine Air Force once dived in from the sky and came out of the hole with no trouble at all.
In this desolate surface of what used to be a famous mine camp, I quickly knew that no vegetation would ever flourish again.
Who was to blame for the permanent loss of vegetative life here?
Nobody, apparently.
The mine was operated on from the early 1930s when forests across the country were green with trees and the towns and cities did not choke on exhaust fumes, and went on for almost 40 years until it shut down in late 1970s, when the true meaning of ecology was still unheard of. Environmental consciousness was not yet in vogue those days because the problem did not exist and nobody had thought of the devastation that a tainted environment would cause later to the mining community. All that matter was the wealth that had been extracted from the bowels of the earth beneath this unfortunate community.
This was the grim future that the villagers of Rapu-Rapu are now seeing for themselves and for their community as soon as the Philippine government said “yes” to Lafayette’s mining operations.
IN LATE August 2005, another would-be miner – the Trans-Asia Oil and Energy Development Corp – started its quest to extract the rich iron-ore deposits of Larap that spread out across an area of 885 hectares clustereing six baranggays that included Larap, Calero, Sta Milagrosa, Sta Elena, Nakalaya and Pag-Asa.
It had presented before the municipal government of Jose Panganiban its exploration work program for the first two years in its MPSA (mineral production sharing agreement) application area. Following discussion of the project background, Trans-Asia’s team of experts explained the “various geological and geophysical surveys, including special studies, which will be carried out to establish volumes of mineable ore”.
An open forum followed the project presentation “enabling both parties to discuss various aspects of the project as well as resolve issues of major concern relating to mining activities … the exchange allowed the Sangguniang Bayan to ventilate its concerns, which in turn Trans-Asia took under advisement …”
The project presentation was in compliance with one of the requirements of the government prior to the awarding of the MPSA.
Trans-Asia, a Filipino company under the flagship Phinma headed by Chairman Ramon V del Rosario, Sr, has dangled before the municipal government its sweetest bait: Economic benefits of mining activity to Jose Panganiban, a now-struggling third-class fishing (no more commercial fish in its water, actually) and agricultural municipality. On the other hand, the miner is looking at a huge deposit of high-grade commercial quantities of iron ore and other high-value minerals which it cannot afford to lose.
Reading through the company’s newsletter account of its exploration plans in Larap, however, I noticed something is glaringly missing. And to me, that is the most important.
Whatever it is, your guess is as good as mine.
Email the writer:
jarahdz500@…
jarahdz500@…
alfredophernandez@…
I was born in Larap, attended primary and elementary school in Larap, and finished secondary education in Jose Panganiban. I agree with the way you described Larap during its “prosperous” years but I strongly take exception to the way you described Larap as a “forsaken community”. Larap may have lost it luster due to economic downturn but Larap was never renounced or rejected. Mining is extraction of unreplaceable natural resources. As you said, the mine workers “came from different parts of the Philippines”. Once the natural resources are depleted,the workers have to seek work somewhere else. That is Larap, just like any other depleted mining communities. The truth is that we, who once resided in Larap, long to see the place we spent happy early stage of life. The only reason that is sad for Larap it that its iron ore did not last forever.
I was born in Larap, attended primary and elementary school in Larap, and finished secondary education in Jose Panganiban. I agree with the way you described Larap during its “prosperous” years but I strongly take exception to the way you described Larap as a “forsaken community”. Larap may have lost it luster due to economic downturn but Larap was never renounced or rejected. Mining is extraction of unreplaceable natural resources. As you said, the mine workers “came from different parts of the Philippines”. Once the natural resources are depleted,the workers have to seek work somewhere else. That is Larap, just like any other depleted mining communities. The truth is that we, who once resided in Larap, long to see the place we spent happy early stage of life. The only reason that is sad for Larap it that its iron ore did not last forever.
This is a sad story of our barrio named larap after PI.M.extracted all the iron ore and made a profits for 30 years they left us nothing….
I hope this letter send us a warning, this might be happen to palawan
I am writing an article on this advocacy? Is there a place where I can download a high resolution copy of the logo?
save and No 2 mining in palawan pls
You have really interesting blog, keep up posting such informative posts!
Thx for this great information that you are sharing with us!!!
tang ina nyo
no mining.. safe palawan…