An environment group said Tuesday that the large-scale mining policy under Republic Act 7942, or the Mining Act of 1995, is not delivering on its decades-long promise of economic development.
Kalikasan People’s Network for the Environment (Kalikasan PNE) made this major assessment saying “from 1997 to 2013, the country only received a paltry P1.00 in every P10.00 profit of the large-scale mining industry, which reaped an estimated total of P1.14 trillion in mineral exports.”
In the said period, large-scale mines produced a total gross production value of P1.31 trillion.
“From 2004 to 2008, there is an apparent under-declaring of mineral production, as tallied mineral exports were greater than total mineral production values,” Clemente Bautista, spokesperson of Kalikasan, said.
The group is preparing for a nationally-coordinated protest activities across the Philippines on March 3, 2014 to call for the scrapping of the Mining Act.
