Mining operations have also caused deterioration of the environment,
resulting to worsened health conditions, affected livelihoods, degraded water
quality, decreased agricultural production and fish catch, and communities’
greater vulnerability to the effects of natural disasters.
On the other hand, a moratorium on mass-scale tree-cutting issued in
2011 effectively makes cases of corporate logging illegal (EJ Atlas, 2018). A log
ban has also been issued in 2017. Despite this, ANGOC has recorded six forestry
investments encroaching upon ancestral domains from 2017 to June 2018.
These cases are either ongoing or have been halted with potential for resurgence
(Salomon, 2018).
Transgressing land rights of agricultural farmers. Of the 193 investment
land conflicts that were recorded by ANGOC from January 2017 to June 2018,
52 percent were plantation investments covering no less than 118 thousand
hectares of land. These agribusiness investments were characterized by the
production of a single type of crop (mono-cropping), thus crippling the food
security of the community (Salomon, 2018).
Many of these investments benefit the investors more than the farmers
they engage in businesses with. The unfair terms stipulated in contracts and lack
of information provided to farmers lead to short-lived benefits, eventual loss of
control over the land, and large sums of debt (FAO, 2016).
Many cases of lease agreements involved investors paying farmers rent
lower than the amortization needed for the farmers to sustain their ownership
over the land. In some instances, this has led farmers to surrender their landownership to the agribusiness company. In cases of growership contracts,
farmers have been unable to meet production quotas that have been set too
high, and are sometimes penalized for such. Furthermore, some growership
agreements do not take into account costs of production and prevailing marketprices, leading to minimal gains for farmers involved in these contracts (Salomon
2018; FAO, 2016).
In 2017, the Philippines has been classified as the second deadliest country
in the world and the deadliest country in Asia for environmental rights defenders
(Global Witness, 2018; Cox, 2018; Watts, 2018). 41 percent of the killings that
Global Witness recorded in the Philippines in 2017 were related to agribusinesses
(Global Witness, 2018). Also taking into account Global Witness’s data, ANGOC
recorded 431 incidents of human rights violations (including 61 killings) related
to land and resource conflicts from 2017 to June 2018 (Salomon, 2018).
ANGOC and KPA
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