DIWALWAL, MONKAYO, Compostela Valley—The Duterte administration’s clean-up drive covering massive areas—with Boracay and Manila Bay as the prime examples—has reached Mindanao, after the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) served the final cease-and-desist order (CDO) to small miners in the Diwalwal gold rush site.
This is another testament to the government’s political will, as like in the other ambitious clean-ups, to be affected are thousands of miners and their families, plus their “influential” backers.
The DENR and its concerned units are saving the waterways around the area from further mercury contamination due to the decades of small-scale mining in Diwalwal that was often marred with violence. This, to date, is the biggest clean-up drive in Mindanao by Environment Secretary Roy Cimatu, DENR Assistant Secretary Ruth M. Tawantawan said.
The move has been set in motion last week after both DENR field officers and local government officials served with finality the CDO that bans any further processing of gold ores near canals and rivers, and inside residential areas in Diwalwal.
Going, going, gone
As soon as the last of the 1,797 ball mills, which are used to crush rocks and stones, and the 31 carbon in-pulp (CIP) machines, used to separate the gold from the ore dusts by applying cyanide, has been removed from the active mining and residential areas of Diwalwal, the dredging of the Naboc River would begin, Tawantawan said.
The river is the main dumping waterway of these processing plants, which throw the mercury- and cyanide-laden water through the several tributary streams at the western slope of Mount Diwata mountain range, which straddles the provinces of Compostela Valley and Surigao del Sur.
“The dredging would start immediately, but it would be contracted by private groups via bidding,” she said.
“That’s the initial discussion, so that it would be fair. Whoever wants to dredge Naboc, anyone who can separate and handle well the mercury, as well as the other minerals, is welcome to bid, Tawantawan added.”
It would be conducted “definitely this year,” she added.
“Our patience ended [on March 14] and we would be filing charges against those who still resist, because it has been a long time already,” she said. The last grace period was given between October last year and March this year.
Every day of violation of the CDO would merit a fine of P200,000.
So far, there were no violent opposition to the teams of provincial and community environment and natural resources officers who served the order between March 15 and March 17 to the 316 owners of the ball mills and CIPs scattered in the various residential areas of Barangay Diwalwal.
The DENR said the dredging and clean-up of the Naboc River is crucial because it goes straight to the Agusan River, the country’s third-largest river basin, which drains into an estimated 12,000-square-kilometer area, including the Agusan Marsh, a wildlife sanctuary.
Fewer grumbles
Edgardo Bayawa, one of those served with the CDO, pleaded with serving officers from the local Mines and Geosciences Bureau and the Environmental Management Bureau, to allow him 10 more days at most to haul the unprocessed gold lying idle at a small tailings pond, and to process the rocks that must be crushed and refined at the ball mills.
“It would take one day to crush and pulverize one sack of these rocks,” he said.
The serving officers were divided, though, with one assuring him that he could negotiate it with the higher officials.
Another small processor would rather stop his processing activities. “It is difficult to get gold from the ores. These few years, a gram of gold could be extracted from three to four sacks of rock ores. That’s how it is getting to be scarce.”
A company-sized unit of Army soldiers was tapped to secure the residential and mining site and to provide security to the enforcement teams headed by 11 community environment and natural resources officers (Cenros) and five provincial environment and natural resources officers (Penros).
They would serve the order to the more than 300 operators of 1,797 ball mills and 31 CIPs.
Still unused
The relocation area has been prepared already in Sitio Mabatas, where a tailings dam was also carved out from within the 60-hectare area, a part of it hedged in by a cemented wall to contain the mines tailings. Additional wall would be constructed atop the existing wall, as the tailings would continue to build up through the years, Tawantawan said.
The Mabatas area is 5 kilometers to the west and down the slope of Barangay Diwalwal.
“The area has been there, ready, but it has not been used,” she said.
Last year, lawyer Alberto Sipaco, former regional director of the Commission on Human Rights and currently designated president of the Philippine Mining Development Corp., announced that the civilian infrastructure needed to transfer the processing equipment and the facilities needed for residential occupancy were already installed.
The relocation in Mabatas is intended to remove the families from shanties perched atop the slopes with tension cracks developing underneath, although the main goal is to bring the processing mills away from the rivulets and streams that feed into the Naboc River, a tributary of the Agusan River.
The heavy contamination by mercury of the Naboc River eventually found significant traces into the Davao Gulf in the 1990s, and forced the government to clamp down on the wanton use of mercury and cyanide.
Toward the end of the 1990s and way into the decade of the 2000s, the Mabatas site was ignored, as miners and barangay officials argued that government has not constructed the necessary structures, like a tailings dam, and basic infrastructure for civilian occupancy.
The order to relocate the residents and the processing machines to Mabatas began a few years immediately after the government took over the small-scale mining operation in the 729-hectare Diwalwal mines in 2002. The National Task Force Diwalwal soon subdivided the scattered and violence-wracked control of the tunnels into cooperatives.
Malacañang also established here the offices of its corporate arm on mining, the Philippine Mining Development Corp., and the DENR’s corporate arm, the Natural Resources Development Corp.
Compliance
“The mining operators have no other recourse but to comply,” Barangay Captain Pedro Samillano said.
The miners, he added, apparently held on to last-minute hope, as in the previous attempts, that the order would not be served. “They called me up or sent text messages telling me that the DENR has arrived in the area. They asked me what to do”.
“Of course, I told them to comply,” he said.
Tawantawan said it was different now. “It is the political will of the President that spelled the difference. It must be implemented and we made it clear that we now have to enforce it”.
Mining officials also said in their speeches shortly before going up to Mount Diwalwal that they would not like to wait for the third State of the Nation Address of President Duterte to call their attention to the mercury contamination in the area.
The DENR said in its briefer that the rehabilitation of the Naboc River “is one of the priorities of DENR Secretary Roy Cimatu.”
Cimatu and Gov. Jayvee Tyron Uy did not attend the send-off program down in Monkayo poblacion. The Uys own then one of the five major tunnel portals in Diwalwal.
The DENR said, however, that the Uys and owners of the other portals have yielded to the government’s relocation program and cleanup of the Naboc River.
Samillano said the national government must also do its share to help these people who would be displaced.
“About 70 percent of the Diwalwal residents and miners would be definitely affected with the sudden shutdown of the 1,797 ball mills and CIPs,” he said.
Diwalwal has a population of 10,400 and the barangay government still depends largely on internal revenue allotment, which reached P10 million last year. It earns about P1 million a year, “but not on the share of these gold extracted from the mines, but from building permits and business taxes.”
He said the displacement’s effect would be hardest in the next three months. “With nothing to find work, or any source of income, these people would starve,” Samillano warned.
“Diwalwal would comply with this enforcement, but the government should also help because the people going hungry would be forced to take action.”
Monkayo Mayor Ramil Gentugaya also aired the same warning. He said the local municipal government would help the DENR and the national government enforce the regulations, “but we also appeal to the DENR: Please, no to large-scale mining.”
Image credits: Manuel Cayon