PEOPLE POWWOW

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BY HERBERT VEGO
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Miners hit back at Sec Gina Lopez

THE 10 metal mining companies suspended by Secretary Regina Paz “Gina” Lopez of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) are certainly not happy over their expected loss of millions of pesos in revenues.
They lament the action of her audit team led by Undersecretary Leo Jasareno recommending such suspension. For this was the same person, during the six years of the Aquino administration, who had found in the same companies no violation of environmental laws. Why the inconsistency?
Projecting herself as an environmentalist crusading against environmentally destructive mining, Lopez has only succeeded in exposing her own misdirection. We hardly know about her academic records. And so people who personally know are at a loss for words vouching for her academic qualification as environment czar.
The shocking information we have of her is that at age 20 in 1974, she underwent rehabilitation for drug abuse at the Dare Foundation. After two months, however, she disappeared.
The next time she appeared in the news, she was a “new woman” doing missionary work for Ananda Marga (a Buddhist sect) in India, Europe and Africa.
She came back to the Philippines in the 1990s to sit as executive director of the family-owned ABS-CBN Foundation, Inc. (Take note that Gina is sister of Eugenio Lopez III, chairman and chief executive officer of the ABS-CBN radio-TV network.) She spearheaded the foundation’s pro-environment projects known as Kapit Bisig Para sa Ilog Pasig, Bayan ni Juan and Bantay Kalikasan.
The Kapit Bisig was the company’s contribution to the national government’s call for clean-up of the polluted Pasig River.
Eventually, Gina Lopez found herself in government, too, as chair of the Pasig River Rehabilitation Commission (PRRC), for which a budget of P17.7-million was allotted, mostly for recycling equipment. She bungled. It can now be said that PRRC failed to remove waste; it succeeded in waste of public funds.
In 1999, in line with its Bantay Kalikasan project, ABS-CBN Foundation inked a partnership agreement with the Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System (MWSS) to restore Quezon City’s La Mesa Watershed, which had suffered from illegal logging.  The restoration took five years and was reopened to the public as the La Mesa Ecopark. On the pretext that the foundation had invested P300 million for rehabilitation, the park management imposes a P50 admission fee. As agreed in the memorandum of agreement (MOA), admission proceeds would be divided among ABS-CBN, 30 percent; Quezon City local government, 30%; and MWSS, 40 percent. (Source: Business World, Nov. 17, 2014).
Despite the MOA, the MWSS revealed, Ms. Lopez would want an additional 15 percent for ABS-CBN Foundation’s administrative cost. Does that not make a mukhang-pera out of a supposedly humanitarian organization?
Another “eco-tourism” venture of Lopez’s foundation, which earned the ire of the Palawan Council for Sustainable Development (PCSD) in 2012, was its “occupation” of the Sabsaban Falls at Brooke’s Point, Palawan, in collaboration with local government officials, without securing a strategic environmental plan clearance from PCSD. The objective was to develop the site into tourist spot with a hotel, restaurant and function rooms. Already, 25 trees have been cut down, paving the way for four commercial lodging infrastructures.  Tribal residents in the area have also been “uprooted.”
The Brooke’s Point Federation of Tribal Councils (BPFTC) has filed a court action for damages against Ms. Lopez and ABS-CBN Foundation for P2.3 million in damages arising from their violation of the Indigenous Peoples’ Rights’ Act which requires any development work done in ancestral domains to go through the Free Prior Informed Consent (FPIC) process.
Banwa, binagbinaga./PN
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