According to DENR estimates, published in the International Herald Tribune, the Philippines has $1 trillion in mineral wealth buried in its more than 7,000 islands. DENR hopes that by 2008, overseas investment in mining will surge four-fold from the current $109 million.

The lack of information about how DENR arrived at the decision to allow foreign companies to continue large-scale mining operations raises the question of whether the major consideration was economic. Certainly, given the horrific experience of Marinduque, where the health effects of toxic mining wastes are still being felt and the majority of people are still by and large poor, great consideration should have been given to social and environmental concerns.

The World Health Organization has had methods available to do evidence-based environmental health risk assessment for decades. Filipino environmental health experts participated in their development as did most experts of both developed and developing member countries of the organization. In Marinduque, these technologies were not stringently applied in the early planning stages of the mining activities simply because environmental health risk assessment may have been deemed being in its infancy at that time mining in Marinduque was initiated.

However, for Rapu-Rapu this is no longer true. It is hoped that this assessment has been done; otherwise such neglect would truly be criminal. But if indeed the social and other human consideration were factored in, how come the results of such analysis have not been made public to rebut the science-based objections of the many oppositors to the project? Investors’ profits from mining in Rapu-Rapu are obvious, the increased income to governments (local and national) is substantial direct, economic benefits for the poor may be apparent but less clear, but balanced against all these should be the evaluation of social and ecological costs. Without this type of information, it appears that the national government assumes that economic values prevail over the values of health and social well-being of people.

It seems a sign of the times in the Philippines that the news about the resumption of mining operations in Rapu-Rapu and the upbeat announcement about the prospects our government’s program to exploit our mineral resources in general came on February 2, 2007. That was the day when the findings confirming the dire consequences of global warming linked to the adverse effects of human activity on the planet’s environment was announced -- the day that Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) says "will perhaps be remembered as the day when global thinking about climate changed from debate to action." Here at home, it is the day when irreversible exploitation of part of the earth took precedence over balancing nature and the needs of human settlements.

Perhaps, in the sea change in global thinking about the exploitation of environmental resources brought on by the global warming report can still be followed by a transformation in the perceptions of DENR. It may not yet be too late to review all recent mining proposals -- even including Lafayette’s designs on Rapu-Rapu. As a matter of fact, all countries in the world are now reviewing the established tensions between their industrial and trade policies on one hand and environmental policies on the other, following the release last week of a report, concurred in by 2,000 of the world’s top scientists, confirming global warming and climate change and linking these adverse phenomena to human activity on the planet. It is hoped that in this regard, the Philippines will not again be considered a laggard in environmental protection.

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In the face of mounting evidence that the health of most of the earth’s peoples would be much better off without them, giant pharmaceutical companies continue to swim against the tide of giving higher value to the health of people than to their commercial interests. Last December in Geneva, at the meeting of an Intergovernmental Working Group convened by the World Health Assembly to review plans to implement recommendations of the Global Commission on Intellectual Property Rights, Innovation and Public Health, the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Associations (IFPMA) put up a fierce fight to maintain the status quo that allows giant pharma firms to block poor peoples’ reasonable access to life-saving medicines by asserting their monopoly rights on patented drugs.

It appears that residual profits from their past bad behavior are still substantial enough for these institutions of greed to continue their rear-guard action against progressive international policies on drugs patents that would favor poor peoples’ rights to health over rich CEOs’ desires to retire with golden parachutes worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Here in the Philippines, a pharmaceutical reform bill appears to be having major problems in the bicameral committee as the Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Association of the Philippines (PHAP) and its giant pharma members continue to lobby against it.