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Gold Mining in Benguet 1900-1941
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... Artisanal and small-scale mining (ASGM) have been practiced in Benguet and elsewhere in the Philippines since the 1800s with the use of traditional mining methods such as picks, crowbars and spades to extract gold ores (Habana, 2000;Habana, 2001;DENR AO 2015-03 2015RA7076, 1991). To get the free gold from the gold ores, processes such as grinding and sluicing with the use of improvised ball/ rod mills and sluice boxes are used (Fernandez, 1985). ...
Artisanal and small-scale mining activities are most evident among communities surrounding the Acupan River in Itogon Benguet. The mining activities include manual extraction of gold ores, use of improvised ball/rod mills and sluice boxes, and metallurgical processing such as cyanidation, carbon-in-pulp (CIP) and amalgamation. This study evaluates the influence of small-scale mining and the geology/mineralization of the Acupan Au-Ag-Te deposit to the water quality of the Acupan River and to the possible human exposures to Hg within the small-scale mining community. Different water quality parameters were monitored along selected sites along the Acupan River for a year and the results showed that the low average values of dissolve oxygen (DO) (2.54–4.53 mg L⁻¹) and the relatively high average values of pH (8.84–10.10), sulfate (300.00–1133.33 mg L⁻¹), nitrate (11.33–134.67 mg L⁻¹), arsenic (As) (0.227–0.574 mg L⁻¹) and mercury (Hg) (0.004–0.054 mg L⁻¹) have exceeded the acceptable criteria limit of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources for Class C waters. The exceeded values are noted to occur in areas where extensive small-scale mining activities are being done and have affected as well the downstream areas. To test possible human contamination in the use of Hg, hair samples from 56 volunteers were analyzed for total Hg (T-Hg) following standard protocols. The T-Hg concentrations in hair samples are mostly inorganic and are determined in various parameters such as sex, geographic location, occupation, age, fish consumption and localization in hair. Though not significantly different, higher Hg values are noted in males (1.280 ± 0.446 ng mg⁻¹) than among females (0.651 ± 0.163 ng mg⁻¹) as well as those with ages 41–50 years (3.130 ± 2.330 ng mg⁻¹) as compared to other age groups. The higher amounts of inorganic Hg in human hairs could be attributed to the discrete yet prevalent use of amalgamation. The findings of this study emphasize the need for better regulations of the small-scale mining activities and for stricter implementation of the total ban on the use of Hg in ore processing to ensure better water quality of Acupan River as well as the health and safety of the communities surrounding the river.
... By the 1980s, the workforce in the Antamok mine has undergone at least four to five generations, with high literacy and producing a considerable number of successful university graduates. Many professionals in the Cordillera region acquired their primary and secondary education in company-built, -administered and -subsidised schools (Habana, 2001). ...
The Antamok mine launched in 1903 industrial mining in the Philippines through Benguet Corporation (BC) whose beginnings, growth, decline and change in business portfolio reflect the vicissitudes of several political administrations, economic policies, and socio-political conditions in the Philippines. The company had modified the physical and social landscapes of Itogon, a mining locality where the indigenous Ibaloy had mined gold in pre-colonial times. After more than four decades of underground operations, BC launched in 1989 the Antamok Gold Project which involved open pit bulk mining. Several communities, representing seven out of nine barangays of Itogon municipality, resisted the project through barricades and marches. With the help of urban-based NGOs, they opposed the open pit operation because it entailed the destruction by heavy equipment of their ancestral lands and homes. It threatened their livelihood and way of life. The resistance lasted three years when BC eventually suspended the project in April 1998, and put the Antamok open pit mine on care and maintenance status. At present, the Antamok landscape includes the huge open pit, which has become an open field for numerous illegal small-scale miners. The company aims to convert the pit into an engineered sanitary landfill.
... While traditional gold mining emerged largely intact from the Spanish colonial period , under American colonial rule (1898-1946) the gold commodity frontier underwent a phase of deepening and widening. What started out as small-scale prospecting activities undertaken jointly by American soldiers and the native population gradually evolved into a capitalized, corporate mining industry (Habana, 2001). Yet rather than leading to the disappearance of ASGM, ASGM-activities would persist alongside corporate mining. ...
In recent decades, alongside the emergence of a truly globalized mining industry, we have seen a strong expansion of predominantly informal artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM). While both trends are often studied in isolation, we argue that they can be seen as products of the same structural process: the widening and deepening of the gold commodity frontier. More precisely, we argue that gold mining, in an attempt to overcome several socio-ecological and socio-political limitations, has expanded outside its historical core into a range of new mining destinations (widening), and has come to rely on an intensification of production through socio-technical innovations (deepening). These processes of widening and deepening have not only led to an expansion of industrial mining, but are also, increasingly, contributing to a (geographically unequal) expansion of ASGM. In addition to targeting deposits that are unattractive for industrial mining, ASGM is better equipped to deal with socio-political uncertainty, and drives down the cost of production through a reliance on flexible informal labour. Using case study evidence from the Philippines and the DRC, we then illustrate how the processes of widening and deepening intersect with (sub-)national processes of political-economic transformation, producing different types of gold mining constellations.
The rising demand for critical metals presents a major economic opportunity for mineral-rich countries. For a sustainable transition to a low-carbon future, it is essential to minimise impacts of mineral resource development to the environment, ecosystems, and societies of these nations. Although there has been considerable progress in the social aspects of the mining sector, environmental metrics are not showing comparable improvement. The Philippines exemplifies this challenge as a country that aims to conserve its exceptional biodiversity to maximise ecosystem services while expanding mining activities for economic growth, in a geographical setting with high mineral potential and vulnerability to natural hazards and climate change. Similar to many mining areas, environmental baselines are mostly non-existent, compounded by a legacy of mining impacts despite an established policy framework. We review issues associated with large- and small-scale mining and identify underlying research challenges and opportunities in the Philippines. Potential environmental research pathways include (i) innovative approaches for catchment scale characterisation and identification of contaminant sources; (ii) quantifying and predicting contaminant transport; (iii) deployment of flexible monitoring devices for larger-scale water quality monitoring programmes; (iv) tailings dam monitoring and management; and (v) resource assessment and metal recovery in ores and tailings. By integrating geomorphological tools with geochemical data, as well as 2D/3D numerical modelling techniques, it becomes possible to predict and understand the behaviour and fate of contaminants across different spatial and temporal scales. The development of cost-effective water quality assessment devices and protocols can help overcome logistical challenges in monitoring a wider range of hydrological conditions. Advanced applications of remote sensing, combined with machine learning, and geophysical monitoring systems provide new opportunities to detect mining footprints and observe change in tailings dams more effectively. Potential impacts of mine wastes can be further minimised by exploring innovative technologies such as the use of metal-accumulating native plant species and environmentally safe solvents to reprocess modern and legacy tailings. Insights from these pathways will enable the realisation of a more sustainable mining future, through the incorporation of findings into existing and future governmental and small- and large-scale mining policy and practice. This will lead to sustainable development for society, particularly in nations that are well positioned to benefit from sustainable mineral resource development.
For centuries, the Ibaloys of Benguet, Philippines, have used traditional methods to mine for balitok (gold) and other precious metals from their mountains. The presence of balitok, like Promethean fire, transformed Ibaloy society: balitok was first intended by the Ibaloys’ foremost deity Kabunian to scatter the settlements called ili and introduce trade to the mountain people. Gold, however, also brought about social stratification and the arrival of colonial forces into the interior Cordilleras in the northern Philippines. As chronicled in their wealth of folk narratives, the Ibaloys’ view of balitok and its acquisition teach us not only of the value of land-based thinking, wealth distribution, and resource management but also remind us that the world as we know it is a world of landslides–of instability and precariousness. Living in our global ili where the present climate crisis destabilizes the everyday, the Ibaloy mythology of gold is a myth for our times, reminding us of our unstable place in nature. Drawing from this cosmology are literary offshoots from Ibaloy writers such as Sinai Hamada (“The Punishment of Kutnon” and “The Pagan”), Ryan Guinaran (“Umsiang”), and Melvin Magsanoc (“The Gold Rush”). They present a reimagining of how the ili is transformed by balitok (and how balitok, in turn, is transformed by us), from Hamada’s reportage of local life in the early colonial period, Guinaran’s Itogon-inspired verses about the transformation and objectification of land through gold, to Magsanoc’s poem about a gold rush that erodes not only the physicality of the land but also our collective well-being.
This study investigates the experience of a gold mining community two decades after corporate mining activities ceased and were replaced by informal subcontract small‐scale mining in Itogon, Philippines. Drawing on David Harvey’s accumulation by dispossession and Daanish Mustafa’s hazardscape, we consider the lasting effects, from 1903, of dispossession upon the establishment of the first commercial mines in the Philippines as experienced by traditional miners in Itogon. Despite the closure of mining operations, mineral lands remain privately owned, resulting in the persistence of legal land dispossession among local small‐scale gold miners. Mining activities still continue as small‐scale miners are able to access abandoned mines through subcontract mining. Subcontract mining has changed the source of capital that funds mining activities from mining corporation to rent‐seeking small‐scale mining financiers, but the new economic relations still benefit from the capitalist logic of low natural resources and labour value. We argue that the production of hazardscapes is a consequence of accumulation by dispossession through (1) processes of expropriation of mineral lands and the consequent creation of free labour among local miners; (2) the externalisation environmental cost as an accumulation strategy that results in the production of socionatural hazards; and (3) exploitation of those who labour and who are made to work in precarious work environment while contributing to the production of hazardscapes.
Control over geographic and sonic space was integral to the United States’ imperial project in the Philippines. This article explores how the creation of the hill station of Baguio was achieved both spatially and sonically through the work of US urban designers such as Daniel H. Burnham. In the early twentieth century, Burnham’s plans for Baguio (and Manila) inspired a model of auditory and spatial planning that colonial administrators hoped to replicate across the archipelago. In this context, I explore how the design and control of Baguio’s auditory environment was part of a wider process to transforming the rural military outpost into a comfortable resort city for U.S. expatriates, members of the Filipino elite, and others to escape the noise, heat, disease and insurgency of Manila and the lowland areas. Furthermore, the article explores Baguio as an “auditory contact zone” where sound configured and framed the interactive dimensions of the imperial encounter between Filipinos and US expatriates. As I argue, the reengineering of urban spaces, such as Baguio, under the US colonial administration was integral in establishing sound as a material symbol of imperial power.
Since the 1980s, the Philippines has witnessed a massive boom in mostly informal ASGM. Across the peninsula, one can now find a wide variety of ASGM-activities: from subsistence-oriented and family-based activities, to what is locally referred to as medium-scale mining. Existing explanations, which treat ASGM-expansion as a product of poverty or as a response to opportunities for accumulation on the part of local elites, are incapable of fully accounting for this situation. This chapter draws attention to how ASGM-expansion fits in with structural trends in the Philippine mining economy. After the “golden decade” of the 1970s, the Philippine mining industry fell victim to a deep crisis and released critical resources (notably labor and technical knowhow) for the subsequent expansion of ASGM. This expansion provided a response to rising cost pressures, as ASGM succeeded in mobilizing cheap and flexible labor power. Meanwhile the national government is implementing formalization policies that do not consider the plight of informal workers, while local government officials are legitimizing ASGM through their personal involvement, and in some cases even through regulatory interventions that give it a semblance of formality.
This essay considers two land disputes that took place in the first decade of U.S. rule in the Philippines and that reached the U.S. Supreme Court: Cariño v. Insular Government (1909) and Reavis v. Fianza (1909). In arguing their cases, litigants were forced to reckon with the property rights regime of the former Spanish empire. In this regard, the cases affirm the import of inter-imperial frameworks for understanding colonial problems of land ownership and sovereignty. When arguing over the rightful owners of Philippine lands, parties to these cases also drew on the history and legal bases of land dispossession and settler colonialism in the American West. Further, in later decades, the arguments made in one of these cases would figure into legal conflicts over Native American lands. These cases thus suggest the value of also examining intra-imperial relationships, the emphasis of this essay. They demonstrate how histories and legal structures of settler-driven “expansion” and extra-continental colonialism informed, even constituted, each other.
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