Malacañang is looking at the possibility of issuing a directive that will allow the government to also monitor and regulate small-scale mining around the Philippines. 

Presidential Spokesman Edwin Lacierda disclosed that the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) and the Department of the Interior and Local Government would undertake a study on how the operations of small-scale miners could be regulated.

“One of the [government’s] moves is to study [Presidential Decree 1899], which granted the local government the right to regulate small-scale miners. We’re studying the process to allow the national government to also regulate small miners,” said Lacierda in a chance interview during the opening of a Bar-B-King store in Pasig City over the weekend. 

He noted that the degradation of the environment, including the pollution of rivers, is not due to the operation of big players. 

“It is the small-scale miners that harm the environment. We saw reports showing that small-scale miners dump pollutants directly to rivers and other bodies of water,” said Lacierda. 

Mining activities that use manual labor and do not use heavy equipment and blasting are considered small-scale mining under both Presidential Decree (PD) 1899 and Republic Act 7076.

PD 1899, signed by then-President Ferdinand Marcos in 1984, indicated that “small-scale mining” refers to any single unit of mining operation having an annual production of not more than 50,000 metric tons of ore.

The directive also typified work in small-scale mining as artisanal, either open cast or shallow underground mining without the use of “sophisticated mining equipment.”

RA 7076, or the People’s Small-scale Mining Act of 1991, was envisioned as the amendment to PD 1899. It limits the exploration area to not more than 20 hectares.

The DENR, however, noted that some local governments still invoke PD 1899.