DIWALWAL—With the price of gold continuing to climb, small miners are holding on to their staked plots on Mount Diwata in spite of declining finds. This is because new gold finds are being reported every now and then and hope springs eternal in the soul of the hundreds of small miners in this mountain mining village, popularly known as Diwalwal, a Cebuano term for heavy panting.
“And because the price of gold continue to climb, and expected to climb much further, miners stick to their places here because of that,” said Jojo Diosana, the barangay secretary of Diwalwal, about 25 kilometers east of this town of Monkayo on the border with Agusan del Sur.
From P300 a gram in the 1990s, gold prices went up to P1,200 for raw gold and P1,500 for refined gold in the mid-2000s. Only a few months ago, a gram of gold already fetched P2,500 for refined gold and authorities projected that its price would not bump on a ceiling but will go up much higher “as gold, just like all metals, are not renewable items but would be mined out in the far future.”
“Gold is gold, and its yellow glitter is always a delight and a source of envy, greed, fashion and a quick source of delivery from poverty in the Philippines,” said Franco Tito, who had been Diwalwal barangay captain from 1997 to 2010.
“Maybe only two or three tunnels have actually made a hit, but it so happens that news of these few hits were being spread around,” he added.
Marideth de Guzman, who manages an area with two tunnels higher up in the Buenas area, about 1,000 meters above sea level, agreed. “They still return to this area because they find home and income here, even for only a little to go around.”
Highly manual operations
THE Philippine Mining Development Corp. (PMDC) posted on its web site that the Diwalwal gold vein systems are “surrounded by copper and gold prospects like Upper Ulip/Matangad Copper-Gold Prospect to the northwest, Mabatas/Higanteng Bato Copper-Gold Prospect the southwest, the Pagasa/Paraiso Gold Prospect to the north, Simulao Gold Prospect to the east, and Mapaso/Letter V/Bermuda Gold Prospects to the south.”
Back at the height of the gold rush on Diwalwal in 1983, getting six kilograms from a bag of 50-kg ore was common.
By September of that year up until the end of the 1980s, Diwalwal hosted as many as 150,000 miners and violence was common on the mountain surface and inside the tunnels.
Today, the average yield is 0.5 grams and even as low as 0.2 gram for a bag of rock ore. “You are lucky to get 0.8 kilogram now,” de Guzman said.
There are bigger operators who use mechanization but for highly manual operations like that of de Guzman’s area, the abanteros (who chisel and chip through the soil and rock wall inside the tunnels) and atraseros (who bag the ores and bring them to the surface for processing) could produce 30 bags per week.
The small operations still use mercury in their ball mill, or motor mill, processing. The big operations, called CIP for carbon in pulp, use cyanide.
The government’s move to auction the portion of Mount Diwata directly below where small miners have been operating have now angered them, as well as made them worry about their future operations.
They have repeatedly called on the government to recall its decision to sell the underground portion to foreign mining companies. Their leaders, including barangay officials, have also repeatedly threatened to resist all moves to allow entry of foreign interests.
It was in 2002 that government took management and full regulatory control of the 729-hectare mining area from the hands of local mining lords, and subdivided the area into 20-square-hectare blocks, hoping to create equal concession areas for jealous and contending miners and mining groups.
As normalcy began to settle, the perceived dereliction of functions and duties by both the Natural Resources Development Corp. (NRDC), the corporate arm of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), and the PMDC, has angered local government executives, including Gov. Arturo Uy, who described them as “inutile.”
The list of complaints from miners and local government executives include the NRDC having been unheard from since the government took over and service contracts have not been renewed, forcing mining operators to revert back to old ways of mining managed by tunnel operators.
Then former Barangay Captain Franco Tito revealed he has collected more than P44 million as the 15-percent share of government in the output of the Diwalwal mines in 2002 and 2003 but Uy said both the province and Monkayo town have not been given their share.
Other complaints, among the long list, include the LGUs have waited since 2003 for the PMDC to prepare the infrastructure of the Mabatas area so that the mercury and cyanide-laden processing plants could be transferred and help contain the dumping of the heavy metal wastes into the Naboc River. Nothing has moved until now.
The supposed P50-million budget for the early development phase of Mabatas as the site of the plants, including the repository of the mines tailing wastes, was also diverted instead to get estimates of the deposit of gold and other metals below the Diwalwal mines site, according to Tito.
Subjective taxation
THE bigger thorn than the low yields were the perceived subjective taxation imposed on tunnel operators and absence of the national government corporate agencies that were mandated to manage the mining operation and tax regulations.
De Guzman said she would pay as much as P38,000 for fees alone annually. For the use of electricity, she would be paying Davao del Norte Electric Cooperative around P50,000 monthly.
“There’s the municipal permit [at P4,548], a barangay permit [P2,000 in 2009], a tax clearance [P500], tunnel registration [P1,700] and garbage fee [P500],” she said.
Transport of ores were also taxed at the checkpoints put up by the municipal government, at P50 per passage of a private vehicle, usually a closed van or a pickup, and as much as P150 per Saddam-type truck.
Her husband added that these “exclude the tigbas [literally to chop, or extortion], like solicitations of whatever kind, raffle tickets worth P2,000, and of course, there’s the police, the Army and other groups who would ask for favors,” she said.
Then there is the “revolutionary tax” collection by the New People’s Army, the military would say.
“We have to pay a lot of things here, but we have to comply in order to operate legally, and just to show government that we operate legally here in Diwalwal,” she said.
“But things like this environmental user’s fee [EUF], this is too much. Why, what’s the difference between the EUF and the garbage collection fee that we are paying?” another tunnel operator complained to the BusinessMirror, on condition that he be not named for fear of being singled out by authorities.
Without national government regulation, he said “we are paying all kinds of taxes here, and we pay individually to each local government, and yet we are continually threatened with the entry of big mining companies.”
Uy told the BusinessMirror that the EUF was his local government initiative to extract its share of the wealth of Diwalwal after being exasperated over the failure of the national government to remit to them the LGU share from taxes on the total value of production in Diwalwal.
“We have not received anything from the national government as our share in Diwalwal. And when anything happens in that place, we are always the one that must respond,” he said. Aside from the calamity fund in the annual budget of the province, Uy said the EUF would augment the fund available for any emergency.
Tito said government collection of P44 million in the first two years that government controlled and managed the Diwalwal mining operations was reverted to the national coffers and it failed to remit the share of the local governments.
He said Michael Defensor, who was then the environment secretary, said in 2005 that the government expected to generate between $1.5 billion to $1.8 billion in mining the rest of Diwalwal.
Since then, however, the national government share in the production has not been collected by either the NRDC or the PMDC.
Everything on hold
BY 2008, the long-planned auction was in full swing, after the government laid out the final plan for the 8,100 hectares of the Mount Diwata Mineral Reservation, but setting aside the 729 hectares for the existing miners of Diwalwal. But below that area was part of the public auction, too.
Angered, residents continued to rally, arguing that in the entire area of the 729 hectares and vertically down should be given to them. They said the yield in Diwalwal would be improved vastly if the entire mountain block below them would be left to them.
Tito’s successor, Rodolfo Boyles, said the actuation of these agencies were “obviously in favor only of giving the area below their area to foreign interests.”
Luke Gatchalian, NRMDC consultant, said at that time that two tailings dams were planned to be constructed. One was 3.4 hectares, the other involved 34 hectares which Gatchalian said “would be enough to contain the waste of the entire operations in Diwalwal.”
He said, however, construction was bogged down by the conflicting claim of tribal residents in the area, which Gatchalian said were recently granted their Certificate of Ancestral Domain Title.
“Nothing happened since then,” said Boyles, “because the PMDC did not do anything.”
The MGB’s M. Echavez said in a meeting in August this year with executives and officers of the PMDC, NRDC and the DENR, “the NRDC promised to send a technical team to review the service contracts that were not renewed since 2003, to collect government share and to recommend the proper kind and volume of chemicals and explosives in the operation of the tunnels.”
The NRDC has also told the MGB that it would meet the service contractors after the national elections in May last year “to determine what is the status of the contracts and the cooperatives that were awarded, and possibly to formulate a new policy regarding continued government control and management of Diwalwal.”
Nothing happened with it, and Echavez said the same thing happened with the PMDC mandate to develop the Mabatas area, where the tunnel operators were also awaiting any word to prepare also themselves.
“PMDC only told us that it was seeking foreign investors to develop the area,” he said.
Vincent Barry A. Lagura, manager of the Business Development Group of PMDC and the agency spokesman, said, “Everything is on hold at this time for Diwalwal.”
This appears to have led, the MGB reported in 2009, that many other miners have moved back to their old tunnels, an action that the agency warned have posed serious environmental and human danger.
But the commonplace quip among miners and local authorities say it all: “It’s better to die here in the mountains with our stomachs full, than to die of hunger back in our hometowns.”
