Professional Documents
Culture Documents
If you cook your dinner in a stainless steel pot or pan, have a computer
for your e-mail and research or wear a watch, the chances are that you
have nickel helping you along. It’s a very valuable and important
metal, it’s in most of the things we use daily and the world is hungry
for it.
The Philippines where one third of the people numbering over 100
million are living below the poverty line has vast reserves of mineral
wealth but they benefit little or not at all. The mining of the precious
metals, gold, silver, chromium, copper, nickel is reaping billions of
pesos mostly for the wealthy.
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Those who benefit are the large scale multinational mining companies
and investors from Britain, Australia, Switzerland, Canada, the USA
and China. They do with the help of the ruling industrial families.
They make up one percent of the population but control or own up to
70 percent of the national wealth. Some of that comes from the earth
and the land of the tribal indigenous people and has caused conflict
throughout the nation.
Such global exploitation is not only confined to the Philippines but is
similar in most developed countries where the ruling oligarchy is part
of the incredible and large scale theft operation. In Nigeria the oil
wealth is disappearing by the billions of dollars.
The law gives huge tax holidays to mining corporations and allows
them to import machinery tax free and other exemptions. The tax rate
is one of the lowest in the world, around 2% to 3% percent of net
earnings. In Australia it is close to 35 percent.
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Environmentalists protested and campaigned against the law and the
scale of destruction and damage to the environment and to the loss of
ancestral lands and the killing of human rights advocates. Even priests
and pastors and church workers have been assassinated for giving
their lives to protect the indigenous people and their ancestral lands
and traditions. The protests still go on.
As many as fifty people have been killed for taking a stand against
environmental exploitation and advocating for a new mining law in
the Philippines. That new law will promote safe and responsible small
scale mining. The large scale mining operations can remove half a
mountain and its forests, pollute its rivers and in a decade and leave a
pit half a kilometer deep.
That’s something that we all can do in our own small way. We can all
be advocates for a healthy planet, we can campaign over the social
media, march for a free countryside, help by planting flowers or trees,
speaking out to save a pond or a tree from being cut down, recycling
our waste.
Small actions together make one great powerful action. Change for the
better is made up of millions of small acts of preservation and love of
life and creation. We will preserve and enhance life, and give us
greater meaning to our lives, existence and purpose on this troubled
planet.