Environment activists, fishers, religious leaders and local town officials in the northern province of Cagayan are crying foul over the ‘river dredging operations’ being conducted by Chinese vessels at the mouth of the Cagayan River, saying the operations are a smokescreen to illegal black sand or magnetite mining. The Manila government has ruled in 2016 that any offshore mining activity within 500 meters of the shoreline and any inland mining activity within 200 meters from the shoreline are prohibited.
Environment activist group Salakniban Cagayan, in an online conference on 30 October, said “People are left in the dark about what’s going on and uninformed about agreements made by the government, particularly those that affect their life and livelihood.” They asserted that the so-called river rehabilitation project will disturb the habitat and migration patterns of the river and estuary’s marine life, and will adversely affect the livelihood of thousands of fishing communities in the province.
Together with local fishers, religious leaders, environment advocates and Aparri town mayor Bryan Chan, they called for a stop to the black sand mining and put “people over profit”.
Cagayan provincial governor Manuel Mamba denied the existence of black sand mining operations in his jurisdiction. He claims that the Chinese vessels at the mouth of Cagayan River, Aparri Delta and Babuyan Sea are conducting dredging operations “at no cost to the government” in order to “mitigate the flooding in the province and to open the port in Aparri.” He said the vessels are prohibited from processing or disposing the dredged materials within Philippine territory.
Environmentalists, however, see the disposal clause as a loophole. Dredged materials are transferred to larger Chinese vessels offshore which can then export and process the magnetite and other minerals for China. Department of Environment and National Resources (DENR) official Gwendolyn Bambalan, admitted, “The dredged materials are shipped out of the country, per Memorandum of Agreement (with the Manila government). How they are marketing it, disposing of it, is the call of the dredgers already.”
The DENR and Cagayan provincial government granted licenses in December 2020 to the Great River North Consortium and Riverfront Construction Incorporated to conduct the dredging operations. The DENR also issued government licenses to the two companies as “dealers, traders and/or retailers of mineral products and by-products.”
Great River North is owned by Mayor Antonio Talaue of Sto. Tomas, Isabela province. Riverfront Construction, meanwhile, was represented by its president Feng Li.
The Philippines and China have the notorious reputation of being the world’s worst ocean polluters, accounting for a combined 4.2 metric tons of plastic marine debris in 2010 and a combined 42.6% of the world’s total ocean plastic debris in 2020.