Minerals governance

Greedy people don’t want us to know that our country is rich in metallic minerals the world desperately needs to go green and curb global warming.

Green metallic minerals such as copper, nickel, and cobalt are raw materials critical for clean energy technologies — such as lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles, solar panels and low carbon technologies.

Such riches however are disturbing to us, making us particularly distrust ourselves that we aren’t disciplined or uncorrupted enough to properly exploit these minerals. Worse, when other powerful countries buy our mined minerals on the cheap, we are made to believe it is the status quo.

If that is the case, why aren’t we doing anything about it?

That was the question Mr. Marcos Jr. attempted to raise last week as he tried to assuage concerns surrounding the controversial Pax Silica project. He claimed the Pax Silica project would enable the country to process green metals locally instead of exporting these as raw ore.

“Let us say, for example, nickel. The Philippines has the second largest nickel reserves in the world. Right now, all we are doing is exporting the raw ore, and then it is processed somewhere else,” Marcos told foreign correspondents last week.

He then cited Indonesia’s ban on the export of raw nickel ore and its subsequent push for nickel processing in their country.

“To be able to do that, you have to develop the processing centers. You have to provide the power for those processing centers. And if you cannot do it yourself, you do it in partnership with either a purely commercial venture or a G2G [government-to-government] arrangement or some hybrid arrangement,” Marcos said.

Here, informed observers quickly saw that Marcos was trying to exorcise what development experts call the “resource curse,” or the paradox that countries with abundant natural resources tend to have less economic growth and development.

A paradox shown by the fact that the mining of green metals and other metals currently only makes small contributions to the country’s economy, accounting for less than one percent of the country’s GDP and 7.9 percent of total exports in 2021, says Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), a Norway-based organization seeking to establish global standards for extracting oil, gas, and mineral resources.

Yet, despite EITI’s presence here since 2013, there’s a strong anti-mining sentiment in the country. Affected communities are openly up in arms against mining’s impact on the environment and the displacement of indigenous peoples, as well as their small share of the natural resource’s revenues.

Despite these charged issues, many policy makers only call for the further tightening of mining regulations.

But experts, even anti-mining advocates, insist that it’s less about “regulation” but more about “minerals resources governance.”

As one anti-mining advocate explains, mining regulation only refers to the process of taking minerals out of the ground and profiting from it, while minerals governance covers the entire value chain, including processing and the final product.

The difference includes the shift in perspective that the citizens and the country must directly benefit from the extraction of minerals through its industrialization, without compromising the ability of the next generation to benefit from the country’s natural resources.

In short, if Pax Silica does take off to locally process the country’s raw ore, the government and its critics haven’t yet clearly explained, much less assured us, that the “minerals governance” is complete, solidly in place and effective.

That perhaps is where both the proponents and critics of Pax Silica are failing miserably.