Prosperity Without Progress. This is the title of the book (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) of Norman Owen on life in the Bicol region from the last century of Spanish colonialism up to the early decades of American rule. In this period, abaca, better known then as “Manila hemp”, exploded in the world market. This ushered in a modicum of prosperity to the residents of the abaca-growing communities for nearly a century. However, after the collapse of the industry in the 1930s due to the rise of the synthetics, these communities became impoverished. There were no alternative industries and livelihoods developed during the heyday of the abaca-export boom. There was temporary prosperity for the abaca-industry participants, but no sustainable progress for the Bicol region as a whole.
In the other “extractive” industries, the situation is worse: prosperity for a few, no shared prosperity for the many and no sustained development for the local communities. This is amply illustrated in the history of the sugar industry, where the lion’s share from the sugar-export earnings went mainly to a small circle of planters, millers and trader-exporters. In contrast, the thousands of sugar workers, composed of the dumaans and the ambulant sacadas, only got a pittance, while the communities where these workers were recruited wallowed in poverty and misery. It is not clear if the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program has altered this century-old arrangement.
A similar situation obtains in the extractive mining industry. The old mining towns in the Cordillera, Bicol and Caraga are some of the poorest in the country, despite the wealth they helped extract for the Manila-based investors and executives. When Atlas, the country’s biggest copper producer, ceased operations in the 1990s, the poor in Toledo City became poorer, because there were no alternative jobs from agriculture, which was affected by the large-scale open-pit mining and the unregulated flow of mine tailings. Nor were there job opportunities in the poisoned rivers and coastal areas of the city.
All this raises a difficult policy issue: What happens once the minerals run out or when mining operations are suspended or terminated?
Life becomes cataclysmic. Take the case of Santa Cruz. From the 1970s to the mid-1990s, Santa Cruz and the surrounding towns of Marinduque benefited from the jobs and export earnings generated by the operations of Marcopper. The mining company, owned and operated by Placer Dome of Canada, also became the de facto Santa Cruz town hall, providing financial support to the various needs of the local communities, from medical assistance to school buildings and sports activities. And then a man-made disaster occurred in 1996. Due to weaknesses in Marcopper’s observance of environmental protocols, its mine-tailings pond burst, disgorging over 80 million tons of toxic tailings that poisoned the Boac River and the Calancan Bay, and buried several communities along the way. Santa Cruz and the surrounding towns were devastated. Placer Dome, which quickly made promises to make reparations, simply abandoned Marinduque; it has failed to honor up to now its reparations commitment. Life in Santa Cruz and surrounding towns has never been so miserable since.
From the foregoing, it is abundantly clear that the government cannot afford to take a simplistic laissez-faire attitude to mining and other extractive industries. Yes, investments are central in the creation of enterprises and jobs. However, investments in extractive industries have serious impact on the environment, which we can only ignore to the peril of the nation and the future generations.
And export earnings, if not equitably shared with the workers and the host communities, perpetuate poverty and deepen social inequality.
In 2012 Dr. Esteban Godilano, the country’s leading expert on geo-hazard mapping, and Christian Monsod, an advocate of comprehensive and rigorous “total economic valuation” of minerals, proposed the following guidelines on mining:
“Mining should only be allowed when four minimum conditions are met: (1) the environmental, social and economic costs are accounted for in evaluating mining projects; (2) the country gets a full and fair share of the value of the extracted resources; (3) the institutional capabilities of the government to evaluate and regulate mining activities are put in place; and (4) since mining uses up nonrenewable natural capital, the money from mining is specifically used to create new capital such as more developed human resources and infrastructure, particularly in the rural areas.” (From “To Mine or Not to Mine”, policy paper of the Climate Change Congress of the Philippines)
The fourth guideline in the above list may be expanded. Money from mining (and other extractive industries) should be used to build up the industrial and agricultural capacity of the host communities. There should be better and sustainable life after mining. In this regard, why should we keep exporting raw ores and importing metallic products processed partly out of these exported ores? In the 1960s and the 1970s, the Philippines became Asia’s biggest copper-ore producer, and yet, resource-poor Japan became the world’s biggest exporter of copper-based products in those decades.
The point is that the country cannot afford to remain blinded by a narrow economic program of extract and export or “extravism”, as the Latin Americans put it. Prosperity for a few should become progress for all. Or, to put it another way, no real or meaningful development is possible without an inclusive, balanced and sustainable sharing of the fruits of growth. Otherwise, we might, as well, kiss “Ambisyon 2040” of the National Economic and Development Authority good-bye.