We are organizations, groups and individuals belonging to the Cordillera indigenous communities or who closely work with them. We have banded together to oppose the San Roque Dam (SRD) project, which we strongly believe will benefit neither the affected communities nor the national economy at large.
With an estimated 35% already done and a target completion by year 2004, the SRD construction is relentlessly pushing forward. Time is running short, and the earlier that this white-elephant project is shelved, the better for the affected communities and for the nation at large. We therefore respectfully but urgently present the following as our summary position paper on this issue.
The SRDP will have a tremendously destructive long-term impact on the land and people of at least three towns: San Manuel and San Nicolas in Pangasinan, and Itogon in Benguet. The most destructive impact will be in the form of flooding of wide areas, resulting in the dissolution of entire communities and irreversible damage to local ecosystems.
When the SRD is completed, the reservoir water is expected to cover 14 square km., extending for some 25 km. upstream from the damsite. It will submerge at least 1,400 hectares of the Agno river valley - including village communities, productive farmlands (much of it terraced and irrigated ricefields), gardens, pastures, forests, fishing grounds, gold-panning sites, water springs, and sacred burial grounds. The NPC itself concedes that at least 386 households will be fully submerged.
More communities and productive lands will suffer chronic flooding over the years, because of the silt that will steadily accumulate in the reservoir and further upstream. This is confirmed by the experience of Ibaloy communities upstream from Ambuklao dam, who now undergo chronic flooding although they were supposedly way above the predicted dam water level.
The 5,000-hectare area immediately around the SRDP has been declared as the Lower Agno River-San Roque Watershed Reservation, while a broader 39,504-hectare area covering four towns has been defined as the dam's "watershed development area."
The government treats most of this watershed area as public land and subject to many land-use restrictions and prohibitions on land-clearing, farming, animal grazing, gathering of forest products, and small-scale mining. This is despite the fact that close to 150,000 farmers and small producers have subsisted for generations on the land and resources, and will now suffer massive loss of livelihood.
Scientific studies have proven that megadams cause serious damage to ecosystems. Wide swaths of permanently or periodically submerged areas suffer the loss of existing flora and fauna, with the biodiversity that they have nurtured for millennia; the destruction of natural aquifers; and the general disruption of ecological balance in the vicinity that will take many decades to restore. The great mass of decaying vegetation produce large gas emissions and cause increases in water-borne diseases.
The SRD's reservoir is vulnerable to flood mismanagement, such as irresponsible releases of flood waters aggravated by Benguet's exceptionally heavy rainfall and extensive siltation along the Agno. Finally, the SRD is located in a landslide- and earthquake-prone region, with the damsite itself near a major fault line that caused the 1990 killer earthquake. "Reservoir-induced seismicity" (RIS) has not been ruled out as a factor. All of these increase the potential for catastrophe either due to actual dam failure, or by disturbed water overtopping the dam.
The dam strikes at the very heart of the indigenous Ibaloy people especially in Itogon, Benguet, who are deeply attached to their ancestral lands as a sacred and priceless legacy. Many Ibaloy communities' crops grow on the land; their homes stand on it; their animals graze on it; they fish and pan for gold in its rivers; their ancestors are buried beneath it. Their ancestral lands and the Agno river system have been the foundation of their very persistence as indigenous people.
The dam's consequent effects of submergence, siltation-caused flooding, and watershed restrictions, will forcibly uproot or drastically alienate these Ibaloy villages from their lands. Ultimately, this loss will result in the dissolution of indigenous community life, as what happened to the communities of Ambuklao and Binga some decades ago.
The loss of ancestral land cannot be mitigated simply by relocating the people to another area or by compensating them with cash or temporary jobs. The Ibaloy people have already lost too much of their ancestral lands in southern Benguet throughout the 20th century, so that tourist havens, mining companies, megadams and industrial zones could come in. We have suffered too much; enough is enough.
The SRD is supposed to generate 345 megawatts of power for the Luzon grid, irrigate 87,000 hectares of lands and help control floods in Central Luzon, and improve water quality for household use. But our people oppose the SRDP because we have too many doubts about its promises to provide our people with substantial and long-term benefits.
Truly, the Philippines needs enough electric power, irrigation and water supply to develop its agriculture and industry, and to provide for our people's basic needs. The SRD is expected to produce enough electricity and water to provide the needs of mining operations, export industries, tourism centers, agro-businesses, and farming activities, as envisioned in the government-planned Northwestern Luzon Growth Quadrangle.
However, we fear that the electricity and water will mainly serve the extractive and sweatshop types of business operations - especially large-scale mines, export industries, mega-tourism facilities, and very specialized cash crops - which lure foreign investors into staying just long enough to amass quick profits. Such businesses are in fact resulting in greater losses to our environment, lands, natural resources and self-sufficiency, rather than in more jobs, more goods, and better basic services for our people.
The 1984 EIA of the SRDP predicted a useful dam life of 40 years if the nearby mines will gradually phase out operations, and 28 years if they will continue at their present levels. But mining operations in Benguet continue unabated. It should also be noted that the Ambuklao and Binga dams have become heavily silted already, after only 25 years.
What we have is a dam that cannot assure sustained service even only for the lifespan of the present generation. Surely, such a dam is not worth the country's troubles to cause the uprooting of entire villages (many of them indigenous communities), to wreak long- term ecological damage to a beautiful river valley, and to spend billions of pesos borrowed from foreign banks to be repaid by next generations of Filipinos.
The entire SRDP will cost around US$ 1.2 billion, or roughly PhP 40 billion. Half of this total cost will go to the power component, while the other half will go to non-power components (irrigation, flood control, aqueduct). It is the Filipino people who will eventually shoulder these gargantuan amounts.
The San Roque Power Corporation (SRPC), a foreign consortium led by Marubeni Corp. of Japan and US-owned Sithe Philippines, will handle the power facility under a BOT ("build-operate-transfer") scheme that gives undue advantage to the consortium, such as:
To finance the power component, the SRPC has so far borrowed US $445.5 million from the JEXIMBANK and several private Japanese banks. Under the BOT scheme, the Philippine government is obliged to absorb and pay the loan should the SRPC fail to meet its obligations to the lending banks. Meanwhile, the government continues to beg the JEXIMBANK for an additional US $400 million, to implement the non-power components of the SRDP.
Thus, ultimately, the Filipino people will pay - as individual taxpayers, as the consuming public of power and water utilities, and as an entire debt-ridden, crisis-prone economy. Meanwhile, whatever happens, the foreign lending banks and the mostly foreign corporations behind the project are solidly assured of super-profits.
The local people of the various affected communities in Benguet and Pangasinan have continuously expressed their grave concern and their opposition to the SRDP, especially since early 1995. They have been coming up with position papers, lobbying the various government agencies and SRDP proponents, linking with other anti-dam groups, and launching pickets, marches and rallies.
Their struggles are being supported by a broad range of sectors in the Cordillera and in Pangasinan. These sectors include indigenous peoples' or community organizations, development NGO's, church and school groups, public-interest lawyers, and some local government officials. Resolutions in support of their demands have been issued by various local government units, which includes the provincial council of Benguet.
Finally, the anti-SRD movement enjoys the support of environmental groups, indigenous peoples' rights advocates, and other dam-affected peoples around the world, in an international movement against megadams that is gaining strength from year to year.
Despite these struggles, the government and the SRPC claim that the anti-SRD opposition is just a noisy minority, or that the SRD is a fait accompli that will push through at any cost.
As a possible solution to our country's growing energy needs, megadams are clearly the wrong way to go. In fact, the World Commission on Dams is presently studying the whole issue of dam-building, in the face of growing worldwide concern and opposition to megadams. Around the world, decommissioning of more and more dams is being undertaken to try to restore river ecosystems back to their previous state, or after rehabilitation had proved impossible.
True, the country's energy needs must be every Filipino's concern. But this is no argument for the SRDP, because there are many alternative energy sources, technologies, and approaches that are being tried and proven effective elsewhere. For example, micro- dams and mini-dams offer many advantages (and avoid the disadvantages of large dams) in terms of impact on communities and ecosystems, technical design, construction costs, finance risks, and community role in operation and management. Such small-scale dams are better suited to rural electrification and local cooperative operations even while they can contribute significantly to the national power grid.
Therefore, we join our people's growing clamor to scrap the SRD as a destructive and ultimately unviable project, and to subject the whole process of national energy planning to closer public scrutiny, with full participation by the communities especially those directly affected by such energy projects.
