Palawan Tribes Go Cyber to Keep Out Nickel Miner

By Melody Kemp

PALAWAN – When big global mining companies set their sights on the Philippine island of Palawan, one of the world’s remaining ecological hotspots and home to many traditional tribes, little did they suspect their China-backed, billion-dollar extraction plans would be met by social media-fueled resistance.

 

Indigenous people in Palawan have organized globally to raise awareness about their plight and to save their ancestral lands from planned large-scale strip mining. One activist group, the Ancestral Land and Domain Watch (ALDAW), has made use of social media tools like Facebook and Twitter to transform what was originally a local movement into a vibrant global environmental campaign.

 

“We have to struggle to maintain interest and momentum,” said Artiso Mandawa, a Palawan leader who is rarely seen without his laptop.

 

The story is a familiar one in Asia: a rich and politically connected mining company wins a government concession granted without local level consultations to exploit precious minerals in an ecologically sensitive area. In this case, MacroAsia, a Philippine miner listed on the local stock exchange, won the right to dig nickel from areas of Palawan, some of which have been recognized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization as a “Man and the Biosphere” reserve.

MacroAsia, majority owned by Filipino tycoon Lucio Tan, started exploration in the area in 2010 and plans to begin operations in April 2012, according to recent company statements. The company holds a mineral production sharing agreement over a 1,114-hectare area and has estimated the mine holds nearly 88 million tonnes of nickel ore. Nickel is used in the production of stainless steel.

 

China’s Jinchuan Group recently agreed to provide funding for a US$1 billion nickel processing plant in Palawan. The Philippines is China’s second leading supplier of nickel and much of the ore mined in Palawan will be exported to China. President Benigno Aquino agreed to $14 billion worth of mining-related investments with China, including an expansion of MacroAsia’s Palawan plans, during his state trip to Beijing in August.

 

Normally these powerful political and economic forces win out over local sentiments and grievances in the Philippines. But Palawan’s mix of ecological wonder, historical significance and cultural uniqueness has drawn a local and global response to the planned mining activities, one that Aquino’s supposedly reformist administration is finding difficult to ignore. On November 10, a group of indigenous people and farmers protested against Jinchuan’s mining plans in the Palawan city of Brooke’s Point, a rare public display of overt anti-China sentiment in the Philippines.

What’s yours is mine

 
High in Palawan’s mountains, indigenous Pala’wan and Taqbanua people live in rudimentary leaf shelters and use sleds in preference to wheeled vehicles. Some live in locations so remote that the national census fails to count their numbers. Yet their desire to stay in their deep forest and their right to do so is being beamed out from laptops tapped on by tech-savvy indigenous leaders.

 

Archaeologists discovered that tigers thrived on Palawan around 12,000 years ago, having entered from Borneo via the Balabac strait. The tigers are now extinct but local people have reported that various other wild cats survive in the remote area. Recent discoveries of until now unknown species in Borneo give hope that Palawan’s unexplored hinterlands may also yield undiscovered species.

Meanwhile, the cloud-soaked mountains of Palawan are home to some of the biggest stands of carbon sequestering natural forest left in Asia. These forests are rich in endemic biota, many endangered species and well represented on the Red List of endangered species compiled by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

 

Palawan is also known as the cradle of Philippine civilization, an area where relics of the earliest Philippine settlers have been uncovered. Local people here have traditionally traded high value resins and other non-timber forest products as well as agricultural produce from swidden and sustainable forest farming.

 

In contrast to this timelessness, ALDAW’s Facebook page is the epitome of modernity with a 10-million signature campaign, photographs of the former Filipino ambassador to Italy Romeo Manalo signing on to protect the wilderness, and various embedded videos of their activist activities. So far, its online petition has secured 6,000 signatures. The Philippines is among the top 10 users of Facebook in the world, sending the group’s message far and wide. In true Filipino style, the campaign to save Palawan against mining even has an official song.

 

But can enough “likes” on a Facebook page save a forest? In March 2006, former president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo moved to revive the moribund mining industry, making it a central plank to her government’s national economic strategy. This included the contract tendered to Macro Asia to mine nickel in Palawan. The results of the policy, however, have been devastating for many local communities.

 

Across the country, open-pit and strip mining has flattened mountain tops, polluted water courses, and felled huge stands of primary and secondary forest. On the resource-rich southern island of Mindanao, a series of high-profile executions of anti-mining advocates has led to rising tension and community fear.

 

Concessions have been given to many foreign investors, including small-scale Chinese miners; who activists say have shown scant concern for the natural environment in their operations. As global commodity prices rise, foreign interest in the Philippines unexploited mineral riches is rising, particularly in nearby China.

 

On Palawan, indigenous Tagbanua, Batak and Pala’wan people are now fighting back armed with laptops and Web 2.0 applications. In collaboration with Dario Novellino of the University of Kent’s Center for Biocultural Diversity (CBCD), they have produced videos to provide communities across the Philippines with more information on the ecological and social consequences of large scale mining.

 

“The companies had been approaching individual villages and people making wild and attractive promises,” Mandawa said. “We wanted to give them information from the other side, so they make decisions based on knowledge not on pressure or dreams.”

 

Other technological tools have been used to challenge MacroAsia’s claims to environmental consciousness during its exploration phase. For instance, hi-tech geo-tagging has appeared to show that mining area claims have pushed deep into ancestral domain lands and legally protected eco-zones.

 

Maps of the intrusions have been loaded onto a Facebook page and linked to Google maps alongside an online petition calling for a halt to mining activities in the area. (This correspondent flew over the area where gaping holes in the ancient forests were already widely evident.)

 

Generational roots 

 
Before the arrival of Spanish colonialists, Palawan’s peoples – the Batak, Tagbanua and Pala’wan, among others – had a complex civilization complete with participatory forms of government, an alphabet and codified trading with seagoing merchants. Families here trace their immediate families back seven or eight generations.

 

Even now, most continue a traditional life, eschewing cities and modernity. The Pala’wan clans maintain a system based on specialized castes, blacksmithing, botany and plant-based medicines, marine and coastal management, and (cyber) warriors to protect their interests. MacroAsia has been aggressive in its attempts to win local acceptance for their mining plan, including outlays for so-called “social and management development programs.”

 

“The mining company took our elders to the stinking cities,” Mandawa said, “and enticed them with electronic gadgets, mobile phones, TV’s. By the time they came back to the village they were infected with a belief that we will all have such things if the mines go ahead. Those who oppose mining never get inside the door. If we ask questions, we are escorted out.”

Now he and others have turned the tables, using those same electronic gadgets brought back from the cities to fight back against the miners.

 

“We made videos in communities that had experienced mining so that the information could be shared,” said Mandawa. “Those people told of broken promises, of being poorly paid wage slaves in their own land, of hunger and rivers where the fish had died. Seeing that and hearing words from the old people gave the communities more resistance to the sweet words.”

 

Their campaign, however, has been met with violence.

 

Gerardo Ortega, an environmental advocate, radio journalist and program manager of Philippine Ecotourism Palawan, was shot and killed with a bullet to the head earlier this year. In Ortega’s news reporting, he had criticized mining companies, including their alleged practice of using of fake tribal leaders to speak in support of mining in public hearings held notably in Manila, not Palawan.

 

“His death gave us energy to fight harder,” said Artiso, a poster on ALDAW’s Facebook page. His murder was covered in the national and international press, and has rallied the segments of the global Filipino diaspora, many of whom had hoped for a change, not murder as usual, with Aquino’s election in mid-2010.

 

MacroAsia had earlier claimed that 50 tribal chieftains and around 80% of the indigenous people in the Brooke’s Point area around the mine have welcomed the project – an assertion ALDAW has strongly refuted. In an August 29 press release, ALDAW argued that the position of “tribal chieftain” does not adhere to any customary definitions or community leaders in Palawan and that the position was invented to fit the interests of large corporations and government agencies.

 

MacroAsia has leveraged the claim of local support to receive a “certificate of precondition” from the Palawan Council for Sustainable Development, which the company needs to commence full mining operations in the area. It is still awaiting a final permit to begin large-scaling mining in the area.

 

Global links

 
Despite its global component, the campaign so far has met with only limited success. Aquino’s government recently announced a moratorium on certain small-scale mining activities. MacroAsia’s type of large-scale mining planned for Palawan has not been affected by the official order.

 

“The moratorium is not a great success. It only prevents small-scale mining. It’s the large-scale mines which could bring Palawan’s biocultural diversity to an ultimate end,” said Kent University’s Novellino. “Yes, the pressure mobilized through the use of the web and e-mails was really conspicuous, and from different institutions.”

 

“But no international campaign can succeed unless it is backed by locally grounded efforts. Before ALDAW was created, Palawan NGOs had no unitary and campaign strategy,” said Novellino. “It was only through ALDAW that active collaboration and communication was established between the villagers, national advocacy bodies such as Alyansa tigil Mina (Alliance Against Mining) and international support.”

 

The campaign has also recruited other groups, such as Survival International and Rainforest Rescue, into the Palawan movement, which is now beginning to focus on the additional environmental threat of large-scale palm oil plantations, a nascent industry here that has devastated large swathes of forestlands in neighboring Malaysia and Indonesia.

 

The IUCN’s Commission on Environmental, Economic and Social Policy and others have provided space for placing video clips into their own websites, to provide additional and different coverage of the Palawan situation. At the same time, activists and analysts say its important to maintain momentum to sustain the campaign and push back against MacroAsia’s plans for the area.

 

“Pressure can only be kept alive with novelty and news to elaborate the cause for which the people are fighting. In that sense, it is essential to have new documentation available: new videos, new geo-tagging evidence, new updates to keep the news and the campaign always on the move,” said Novellino.

 

“This is why ALDAW has put so much energy into participatory videos and field documentation. If you recycle the same news and stories, the vigor of the campaign is diluted.”

 

One new angle has been to put pressure on the United Nations. UNESCO’s Office in Jakarta said that its “Man and the Biosphere” ranking for biodiversity hot spots deferred to national sovereignty in relation to land-use issues. After a social media-fuelled call to act, UNESCO has since promised to investigate the claims made by ALDAW and others.

 

Melody Kemp is an environmental journalist currently living in Indonesia.

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