LOCAL GOVERNANCE AND LARGE MINING INTERESTS:
The Case of Benguet Province
Ferdinand M. Bolislis
(Paper read in the 1998 New York Conference of Asian Studies, SUNY New Paltz, 16 October 1998)
Introduction
This poverty of resource-depleted localities contrasted with the wealth and power of extractive industries is a textbook fact played out across the developing world. Governments continue to advance the massive utilization of non-renewable capital in the name of trade and development. Specifically, the extraction of minerals is an industry which, outside of environmental damage and pollution it causes, also promotes an inequitable exchange that favors corporations linked to developed nations at the expense of Third World communities, for whom the returns are minimal and the costs heavy. Two of the biggest and most controversial mines in the world, the Grasberg mine of Freeport McMoran in Irian Jaya, Indonesia and the Bougainville mine in Papua New Guinea, are mired in heated conflict with indigenous populations over environmental despoilation and unequal economic arrangements. The situation recalls the Gunder Frank school of dependency theory that "the essential capitalist relation is a market exchange whereby profit is realized for the benefit of someone other than the direct producer" in a system that allows an extractive monopolist to overpower a weak satellite [Ruccio 126]. As the world pursues the ideals of sustainability and globalization, this problem needs to be addressed immediately.
The province of Benguet, in the northern Luzon highlands of the Philippines, is a classic picture of underdevelopment despite close to a hundred years of mineral extraction . It hosts the Southeast Asia’s oldest gold and copper mining corporations which operate in areas once owned by the resident Ibaloy and Kankanaey tribes. Discussed in this paper are the industry leaders in gold and copper production for over five decades, Benguet Corporation in Itogon municipality and Lepanto Consolidated in Mankayan.
In 1992, large-scale mining output in the province was valued at P4.4 billion (roughly US$157 million) of gold, silver, and copper, mostly for shipment to Japan, Europe and the United States. Still, Benguet remains one of the 20 poorest provinces in the country, with official census figures in 1995 indicating poverty incidence in 20% of its population of 313,833 people [Benguet 24]. In 1991, half of the population survived only a notch above the poverty line by earning P40,000 to P60,000 (about $1,500 to $2,300 at pre-devaluation rates) annually [Ibon 42]. Agriculture is the main livelihood, with 61% percent engaged in farming, and 39% in various forms of mining [Benguet 23]. The environmental damage wrought by mining on Benguet’s terrain and waterways as well as the adjoining provinces has been well-documented in media. Opposition to mining has stepped up as mining areas expanded into forests and farmlands, whose water sources were subsequently drained.