Isabela Farmers Lock
Horns with American Mining TNCs
Two American transnational
corporations are in Isabela province in northern Philippines to set up
coal-fired power plants and tap Isabela’s coal deposits worth millions of
dollars. Their partners in the Philippine government say this would help
energize Luzon island. But thousands of farming families do not want to trade
their future for the project and are fighting to keep their land.
By Zelda
Soriano
Isabela in northern Philippines is a typical farming province that is linked to other provinces by the Sierra Madre mountain range. Endowed with natural resources, the province is now on the world map for one reason: its coal deposits worth millions of dollars. Two American transnational corporations are in the province trying to corner this bounty which, their Philippine government partners say, would help energize Luzon island. Still, thousands of farming families do not want to trade their future with the project and their fight to keep their land has just begun.
Despite efforts to tap alternative sources of energy over the past 30 years, the Philippines remains heavily dependent on crude oil imports to run its industries, electrify its communities and transport people and goods. There have been a few breakthroughs in the past in which geothermal resources – deemed abundant in the country – have been utilized but with attendant environmental costs.
Now, this one is no different. A coal-fired power plant project that is expected to boost the country’s electricity and industrial resources will begin operation four years from now in Isabela province, northern Philippines. The project has sent a chilling effect on the people: some 50,000 of them living in 24 barangays (villages) will be displaced while a total of 1.5 million residents will be indirectly affected mostly by pollution.
Its project holders boast of using the fluidized bed (or “clean coal”) technology that would minimize pollutants. It is a system found by environmental scientists however as the world’s dirtiest technology.
In the tri-boundaries of Cauayan, Benito Soliven and Naguilian towns lies a 20,000-hectare complex – site of the coal mine and three 150MW thermal power plants planned to be erected. With full government support, the project is operated by Axis Developers, Inc., the major investor and power plant operator, and Congentrix Energy, Inc. Both Axis and Congentrix are American transnational corporations.
Congentrix, a power producer based in Charlotte, North Carolina, operates several electric generating facilities mostly in the United States. It has at least one major power project in the Dominican Republic. Strong public resistance forced the withdrawal of the company’s other project in Karnataka, India.
The three Isabela towns are melting pots of various cultures and ethnic minorities including Ilocanos, Bicolanos, Tagalogs, Visayans, Ibanags, Gaddangs and Yagods. The farming population grew during the 60s-70s when migrants from the Ilocos provinces, La Union, Nueva Ecija, Nueva Vizcaya, Tarlac and Pangasinan flocked into the area to put up homesteads offered by government. They were joined later by hordes of refugees driven off their homeland by military counter-insurgency operations.
The tri-boundaries, noted for verdant green rolling hills, valleys and rivers, gave some refuge to the new settlers who soon developed the area into communities revolving around the only work they know: farming.
Meantime, in 1975 - three years after President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law - Basilio Toquero, owner of the Isabela Coal and Energy Corporation, a small mining firm in Cauayan, struck what was described as the biggest coal find in the country: a 28 million metric tons of recoverable coal deposit classified as lignite. The coal deposited was estimated to have a heating value enough to fuel a 600 megawatt power plant or a 150MW plant for 20 years. Fired with a dream to transform Isabela into a progressive mining enclave, Toquero sought government assistance.
The miner’s efforts led to the formation of the Isabela Energy and Service Project (IESP), headed by Axis Developers Inc. As coal developer, Axis got the help of the state-owned Philippine National Oil Company-Exploration Corporation (PNOC-EC), as coal lease holder and coal mining operator. The project involved open pit mining of lignite coal covering 9,000 hectares and constructing two to three coal-fired power plants that would supply energy to the National Power Corporation’s Luzon grid.
A tree farm covering 5,000 hectares will supply 10 percent biomass fuel needed for the power plants.
In 1999, PNOC-EC began drilling operations with the use of strip-mining or open pit. Construction has also started for an initial 150MW mine-mouth power plant into which indigenous coal will be fed.
Dr. Butch Ramos of the Bureau of Mines and Geosciences’ Metallurgy Division says the process is by far the most advanced and relatively clean coal burning technology used in industrialized countries.
Like oil and natural gas, coal is fossil and non-renewable energy fuel. It is formed from the decay of plants that lived millions of years ago. Plants in swamps decay under water without oxygen. Bacteria that live on submerged plants use oxygen from the dying plants and release carbon and hydrogen. These hydrocarbons eventually form coal. The lignite or brown coal is the type found in Isabela.
Using fluidized bed technology, coal is ground to a fine powder which in turn is treated with steam and oxygen, yielding natural gas or methane. The natural gas is an energy source that powers industries and provides electricity, heat and other industrial uses. The technology, Congentrix officials said, will have less ash and toxic waste emissions and thus minimize pollution during plant operations.
Ramos points out the supposed advantage of coal compared to oil and other energy sources: it is cheaper to produce.
Based on government projections, the Isabela coal project is expected to bring in $217.41 million in investments in the next three years. This is aside from P37.22 million ($.74 million) in annual taxes to the local government and an electricity service for site residents at a subsidized rate of P1 ($0.02) kwh.
The project is one of five Department of Energy (DoE) projects under a more aggressive Philippine Energy Plan (PEP) for 2000-2008. The plan seeks to achieve a 47 percent self-sufficiency in energy resources by 2008. Coal, which is also being mined in other parts of the country, is expected to boost the country’s electricity service sector.
In coal production, the DoE targets an increase from 1.2MMT in 1998 to 4.9MMT by 2008, based on the demand projection for local oil and the estimated level of investment inflow.
On the other hand, government’s Coal Development Program accelerates the development of a coal basin in Zamboanga in southern Philippines and the establishment of nine mine-mouth power plants in Semirara, Panay island as well as in Samar, Cebu, Surigao del Sur and Zamboanga del Sur.
To lure foreign investments into the energy program, government offers a package of attractive contractual terms for mine exploration such as exemptions from tax and tariff duties, capital repatriation and profit remittances. No other Filipino company enjoys the same package.
As in many other development projects, the Isabela coal project could prove costly. Of the 3,000 farming families or about 50,000 individuals in the towns of Cauayan, Benito Soliven and Naguilian to be uprooted, 90 percent have lands, ranging in size from 3-5 hectares.
Artemio Soriano, a farmer from Benito Soliven, says that his family has only known farming as their means of survival and to relocate them elsewhere to give way to the coal mining project is something he will not voluntarily submit to.
Residents say Axis is offering outright cash payments of P40,000 ($800) per hectare to every farmer holding original land titles plus free housing.
Now, here’s the catch: Melchor Batalla, a member of a farmers’ group in Isabela, says that most of the farming families in the coal site have been tilling their lands since the 1950s. The farmers applied for titling under various land reform programs in the 70s-80s to no avail.
“What will happen to thousands of farmers who, in the absence of a land title, will be driven away without any compensation?” Batalla asks.
The coal site used to be part of the province’s vast forest cover which was developed into farms and villages. It is however registered by government as a “forest land” and “government property,” a condition that would legitimize the operation of the TNC coal mining project based on a lease agreement.
“What the people need here is genuine land reform and not electrification which the project holders are dangling to them,” Batalla continues. He vows there will be no deal with the mining firms even with their compensation offer. He and many farmers have joined the Anti-Coal Mining Movement (ACMM) with the support of the militant Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP – Peasant Movement in the Philippines) as well as groups of scientists and environmentalists.
Aside from displacing entire communities, the coal project is also feared to create untold pollution never before known in the province. Coal mining, a group of scientists from Agham and the University of the Philippines say, is a “dirty technology that is almost impossible to be made environment-friendly except when used for small-scale production.”
The scientists, together with environmentalists from the NGO Center for Environmental Concerns (CEC), recently went on an environmental investigation mission (EIM) to the coal site covering some 13 barangays. What they found, says CEC’s Delai Padilla, confirmed their worst fears.
The project, she says, will definitely induce air pollution in the form of atmospheric gasses and pollutants such as sulfur dioxides, nitrogen dioxides and carbon oxides in the form of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. These compounds are hazardous to human health and, in high concentration, could cause climate change owing to the warming effects of carbon dioxide.
Coal mining, Padilla says, is a major source of acid water pollution. It produces a lot of sulfur compounds resulting in sulfide mine tailings and, in worst cases, acid rain. It could also severely contaminate sources of potable water and if spilled into rivers, including the mighty Cagayan River, would turn these water bodies biologically dead.
Agham’s findings also foresaw severe soil erosion due to the open cast mining. As huge volumes of topsoil are scraped, and with the muddy character of the surface materials in the affected barangays, eroded materials would be deposited in low areas. Excavations will also cause heavy sedimentation in rivers.
Worse, the mission also found, for every 60MMT of ore extracted annually around 50 MMT of topsoil are removed.
The mission’s report concludes that the project is found in a “relatively fragile and immature ecosystem composed of small plains and very few decomposers.” Damage to the ecosystem will be irreversible, it adds.
Similar concerns were expressed by two international fact-finding missions, the Foodfirst Information and Actions Network-International and La Via Campesina, in August last year.
A Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) report also confirms that coal mining is known for having created the worst mining disasters. In 1994, in a coal mine in Malangas, Zamboanga del Sur, 71 persons were killed and 12 more were declared missing following a methane gas explosion inside the mining shaft. The mine site is run by the PNOC.
A year later, 25 persons more died in another coal mine blast in Bislig, Surigao del Sur. The mine’s entrance tunnel caved in when a pocket of methane gas was accidentally hit by the miners. The coal mine is owned by the Sta. Fe Mining Corporation.
Such death toll and other types of disaster loom ahead in the Isabela coal project. If not halted, this new “development project” could spell doom to the province’s thousands of farming households. But, like several communities in other provinces confronted with a similar ”development aggression,” they will not be taking it without a fight. #