Abstract
Increased mining activities in indigenous peoples' lands in the Philippines have brought to the fore questionable free and prior informed consent processes despite the legal protection of indigenous peoples' rights to autonomous decision-making regarding the use of their lands and resources. Inadequacies in the implementation of the law, as well as the complicity of state agencies in circumventing its requirements, are among the major causes of this problem. This reflects the distribution of resources and power in a country where indigenous peoples are among the most marginalized in terms of influencing policy decisions and implementation. Given this situation, Philippine indigenous peoples and advocates have resorted to direct political action to assert their right to autonomous decision-making over their lands.
The ways in which indigenous peoples wage their struggle for respect of their rights are often influenced by contextual specificities. This explains the differences in the methods of political action between the San's assertion of their right to a fair distribution of benefits from the use of their plant genetic resources on the one hand, and the Philippine indigenous peoples' struggle with the mining industry on the other. Nonetheless, similar insights can be drawn from both cases, such as the importance of collective, participatory action and the delicate roles that civil society advocates can play. In the ultimate analysis, advocates for indigenous peoples' rights should learn to take a supportive role enabling indigenous peoples to speak with their own voice and actualize their autonomy.
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Notes
- 1.
1 NGOs and indigenous peoples' organizations call these kinds of development projects ‘development aggression’.
- 2.
2 The phrase ‘social faultlines’ referring to social inequities was used by Paul Farmer in his discussion of the distribution of the burden of infectious diseases in society and inequities in income and power (Farmer 1999).
- 3.
4 In the agreement, the Philippine government grants the contractor the right to mineral resources in the area, while the contractor provides the capital, infrastructure and personnel.
- 4.
5 Strip mining is very similar to open pit mining. It involves the removal of the topsoil to get to the subsoil resources. In Mindoro, Mindex/Aglubang will remove about 10 m of the topsoil, then transport the nickel-containing soil to a facility which will separate out the nickel.
- 5.
6 Arne Isberg, Crew country manager, claimed that ALAMIN was connected to the New People's Army (a rebel group that has been waging a Maoist insurgency in the country since 1969). He requested the Armed Forces of the Philippines to provide security after a series of attacks on Crew's facilities by armed groups (Gariguez et al. 2005).
- 6.
7 Mining companies vehemently opposed IPRA. They argued that it violated the Regalian Doctrine. They also claimed that foreign mining investors could be discouraged from investing despite the liberalized mining law (Cruz 1999). The Regalian Doctrine, also known as ‘jura regalia’, is a fiction of Spanish colonial law that has been said to apply to all Spanish colonial holdings. It refers to the feudal principle that private title to land must emanate, directly or indirectly, from the Spanish crown with the latter retaining the underlying title. Lands and resources not granted by the Crown remain part of the public domain over which none but the sovereign holds rights (MacKay 2004).
- 7.
8 IPRA defines ancestral lands or domains to include concepts of territories that cover not only the physical environment but the total environment, including spiritual and cultural bonds to areas which the indigenous peoples possess, occupy and use and to which they have claims of ownership.
- 8.
9 The full text of IPRA is at www.ncip.gov.ph/downloads/philippines-ipra-1999-en.pdf.
- 9.
10 The Tebtebba Foundation, an NGO having special consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations, with the Asian Indigenous Women's Network and the Cordillera People's Alliance, submitted a report based on their study on the experience of indigenous peoples with the FPIC provision of IPRA to the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in 2006. See also www.tebtebba.org/tebtebba_files/ipr/ipr.html for more on Tebtebba's case studies on FPIC issues.
- 10.
11 The UN Human Rights Council sent special rapporteur Philip Alston to the country in 2007 to investigate hundreds of reported extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances. In his report, he concluded that the state military forces were involved but the government was in a state of almost total denial (Alston 2007). Also in 2002, Rodolfo Stavenhagen, UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous people, arrived in the country to investigate the plight of indigenous peoples. He found out that many indigenous peoples, especially those who resisted projects deemed development aggression, were victims of state harassment (Bulatlat 2007; Tebtebba 2002).
- 11.
12 For a critical and historical analysis of the state, see Hall (1994).
- 12.
3 There are no tribes in the Philippines in the technical anthropological sense. However, most indigenous peoples have appropriated the term to refer to themselves.
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Castillo, R.C.A., Alvarez-Castillo, F. (2009). The Law is not Enough: Protecting Indigenous Peoples' Rights Against Mining Interests in the Philippines. In: Wynberg, R., Schroeder, D., Chennells, R. (eds) Indigenous Peoples, Consent and Benefit Sharing. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3123-5_14
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