President Rodrigo Duterte has directed the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) to ban mining in watersheds and to require mining companies to plant trees in barren areas within the company concession, which are not utilized for mining, Environment Secretary Roy Cimatu said on Thursday.
Cimatu said that Duterte directed the department to look into alternatives other than open pit mining, saying that the latter is not against it as long as mining companies extend assistance to communities affected by the open mining.
“During the Cabinet meeting last September 4, the President ordered me to look into other options or modalities in getting what is inside the bowels of the Earth aside from open-pit mining,” Cimatu said in a press briefing.
“Mining companies will be given that elbow room… but eventually, at some point in the future, open-pit mining will have to return or to turn more environmentally-accepted methods,” Cimatu added.
It can be recalled that Duterte affirmed the banning of open-pit mining because it is a “dangerous environmental activity,” saying he would give mining firms time to look for alternatives to extract minerals.
“I agree with Gina Lopez that that has to stop sometime. But I’ll give the mining companies enough elbow room … for eventual change in the modality of getting what’s inside the bowels of the earth,” Duterte said.
Open-pit mining is permitted by the country’s mining law. However, Lopez, who was a former environment chief, barred it during her tenure, saying it destroyed the economic potential of places where it was practiced.
The secretary also said that he is eyeing to increase the excise tax on mining companies.
“We have to plan properly how much of financial and so forth and so on. But mukhang maliit ‘yung two percent [The two percent looks small],” he said, citing that the mining industry is just currently contributing less than one percent to the GDP. “Other countries, they are getting about 10 percent, 8 percent. In fact, one country in South America is getting 15 percent.”
“So these are the things that we have to look because as of now, we are the fifth mineralized country in the world and their estimate is that if we can get all these, it can translate into a very big revenue for the government and it can translate I think into trillions of pesos,” he added.