IF oil companies can give as much as P1 to P2 per liter in price discounts to transport drivers, and as rebate incentives in tie-ups with credit-card institutions, why can’t they fund Environment Secretary Regina Paz L. Lopez’s massive job of rehabilitating closed mines and funding programs to reverse the pollution caused by the same oil companies?
“Energy” to fund rehabs? They can easily absorb these discounts as they have been granting them out anyway as part of their regular marketing thrust. If they add 50 centavos or P1 per liter on current market retail prices, motorists will not mind the additional burden as they have been experiencing the same monthly price fluctuations the past years.
As there are over 30 billion liters of gasoline, diesel, kerosene and bunker fuel consumed per year, an additional P1 per liter amounts to P30 billion a year to rehabilitate mining areas and pump prime the countryside.
“Caring for others” While miners are admittedly destructive no matter what responsible system they use, they argue that we need metals for cars, cell phones, etc. But if the economic, social and environmental costs far outweigh the benefits, it is worth supporting Lopez’s position.
If free-market economists argue why focus on planting rice if it is cheaper to import, then we can use the same argument why mine locally if it is not our natural competitive advantage being an island economy with the risks involved in inter-locking contiguous ecosystems from aquifers, river systems, agriculture, marine ecosystems, etc.
As miners cannot blame others but themselves for their neglect, incompetence and greed, like allowing smugglers to control 95 percent of Philippine gold trade, perhaps, it is high time we give Lopez a chance to correct the decades of ravages by mining that destroyed the environmental and brought poverty to our people.
Miners overmine and undermine? Left alone to mind (mine) their own business, miners tend to overmine in total disregard for the environment and undermine the government and the communities. Despite a production of P66.6 billion a year, mining contributes only 0.6 percent of total employment and P16.7 billion in taxes. They also earn unfairly 82 percent of total net revenues, of which 95 percent goes out of the local economy.
Worse, after extracting it of all its mineral value, a mine is laid to waste with the government paying for rehabilitation like the P300 million spent on the old Bagaca Mines in Samar. Another mine was found with mercury levels of as high as 12 parts per million (ppm), about 6,000 percent more than the allowable 0.002 ppm, which put to risk the ecotourism potentials of the hot springs nearby.
For Lopez, mining in a watershed must be totally banned as even the World Resources Institute (WRI) declares that despite our high rainfall, there will be a water shortage by 2040 at the rate we are destroying our watersheds.
Potentials bigger without mines? There are model places that have stopped mining and now earn more. Lopez says, “Costa Rica has zero mining and zero poverty; while Bhutan also has zero mining, offers free health, free education and has among the happiest people in the planet earning $2 billion a year supplying water to China and India.”
Similarly, we can capitalize on being the world’s top in marine biodiversity. “We have seashells and sponges that can potentially cure cancer and venoms of sea snakes better than medical morphine,” she told Rappler.
She insisted she has the proven track record to show like P1-million investment in one project now earns P30 million a year for a community; another P1.5-million investment in Palawan now earns P40 million a year; and about 5 to 7 projects in Supertyphoon Yolanda-affected areas have recovered investments in 10 months.
If business doesn’t mind, it will matter. If the oil firms will not mind paying forward these consolidated fuel discounts that are barely felt anyway by transport drivers, then it will matter a lot. For one, the same money will now be spent on creating physical wealth through agricultural and infrastructure development. Second, they will trigger higher multiplier effects as money circulates more and remains in the countryside, thus boosting incomes and purchasing power of rural folks and growth in domestic market.
Unfortunately, if collected as an excise tax, it will take time with the tedious legislation process. And if approved as a tax, it goes up to the National Treasury under the one-fund system, and can only be spent back by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) if appropriated by Congress, unless specified by law.
Tricycles back ‘Forests for the Poorest’ fund. Surprisingly, even the National Capital Region Toda Coalition, the confederation of 17 tricycle federations in Metro Manila led by Ace Sevilla, supports Lopez’s thrusts to reciprocate the favorable educational “Tricyclean” program of EMB-NCR under Director Minda Osorio, hoping it is also replicated on a mass scale. As tricycles consume only three to five liters of gasoline a day, even a P1 add-on price only costs P3 to P5 per day.
But their sheer number can fund proposed projects, like building hundreds of thousands of catch basins on mountain slopes as the most effective climate-adaptation strategy to prevent soil erosion, downstream flooding, as well as provide mountain irrigation, making it possible to grow forests or watersheds under the proposed program “Forests for the Poorest”.
Millions of jobs possible. The catch basins can also be stocked with fish and a source of potable water if treated with technologies. Moreover, they can be built in a pick and shovel construction frenzy that can potentially generate millions of productive jobs, similar to what US President Franklin D. Roosevelt did during the 1930’s Great Depression, when he created four (4) million jobs in a month’s time, equivalent to over 10 million today, says a book by Nick Taylor entitled “When FDR put the Nation to Work.”
And these were not ordinary jobs like street sweepers, or workers hired to dig up ditches only to fill them up again, just to get people employed, which is Keynesian economics of merely perking up demand. Roosevelt did more by building a physical economy, a concept of Wilhelm Gottfried Leibniz, and funding it using Alexander Hamilton’s credit- creating principles, which are an entire discourse altogether.
It is rare to have another Gina at DENR, so policy-makers must thus take a “Carpe Diem” stance of seizing the day, seizing the moment as opportunity only knocks once.
E-mail: mikealunan@yahoo.com.
1 comment
Totally agree! We must give Ms. Gina a chance to serve.