Sagot :
Most of the country’s metallic minerals, including gold, iron ore, lead, zinc, chromite, and copper, are drawn from major deposits on the islands of Luzon and Mindanao. Smaller deposits of silver, nickel, mercury, molybdenum, cadmium, and manganese occur in several other locations. The Visayas are the principal source of nonmetallic minerals, including limestone for cement, marble, asphalt, salt, sulfur, asbestos, guano, gypsum, phosphate, and silica. Petroleum and natural gas are extracted from fields off the northwest coast of Palawan. Copper has remained the country’s primary mineral, although changing world market demands and investment incentives have rendered its production somewhat volatile.
Explanation:
Facing conflicting demands from the mining industry and from communities adversely affected by mining, the Philippines has never settled on a stable mining policy.
Opposition to mining centers around the ecological disruption caused by mines, human rights abuses connected to the industry, and disputes over how profits should be shared.
The Philippines is believed to hold around $1 trillion worth of mineral resources, but an anticipated mineral boom has so far failed to emerge.
Recent legal changes cast even more doubt on the mining industry’s future.
DIDIPIO, Philippines – Before OceanaGold began to systematically remove any trace that Dinkidi Mountain ever existed in northern Luzon’s Sierra Madre range, 100 farmers raised rice and citrus crops on farmland they had cleared in the mountain’s shadow. Didipio was a village of 700 residents, many of whom settled on Dinkidi’s east side in the 1960s and 1970s after walking, with their children in tow, for two days on steep forest trails.
In many ways Didipio was a rare place of hard work and solitude, a village difficult to reach by vehicle or on foot, and distant from the mainstream of Philippine life.
Many of those settlers — a minority in a village that today has 3,000 residents — blame Australian-Canadian mining company OceanaGold for ending Didipio’s era of agrarian calm.
Starting with construction in 2011, it took just two years for the company to replace Dinkidi with an open-pit gold and copper mine nearly a kilometer in diameter and nearly 300 meters (~1,000 feet) deep. Millions of tons of mine waste forms a perimeter of terraced rock around half of the mine. Above that is a green lagoon filled with liquid tailings, spreading over more than 100 hectares (~250 acres) where rice was once cultivated