When then President Ramos announced the construction of the San Roque Dam in the boundary of Pangasinan and Benguet provinces in 1994, Ibaloi families living near the project site began to brace for the worst. They knew that once construction work began, they would be driven out of their homes and ancestral lands.
True enough, when the site preparation began in 1997, some 300 Ibaloi families in Itogon, Benguet had no choice but to transfer to a resettlement site that the government had set aside for them.
It was not the first time that this had happened to them. Together with other indigenous groups-- collectively referred to as Igorot (mountain folk)-- in the Cordillera mountains, the Ibaloi people have been victims of what is now known as “development aggression.”
The Igorot’s misery began in 1946, when then President Roxas commissioned Westinghouse International to survey potential new sources of energy in the country. Westinghouse later identified the Agno River, which originates from the southern slopes of Mount Data in Mountain Province and flows mightily southward through eastern Benguet before disgorging into the Lingayen Gulf in Pangasinan, as an ideal major energy source.
Thus, when the first Philippine Power Program was drafted on the basis of the survey team’s findings, the development of hydropower facilities in the Agno River basin became one of its major features.
In 1952, the construction of what would be the biggest dams in Asia at that time– the Ambuklao and Binga dams-- commenced. As sacrificial lambs, hundreds of helpless Ibaloi families were displaced from these two dam sites to homestead areas in the neighboring Conwap Valley of Nueva Vizcaya, the Conner area of Apayao, and in far away Palawan.
To the relocated Ibaloi families, it was back to square one. Being unfamiliar not only with the terrain there, but also with the new socio-economic situation they found themselves in, they were not able to resettle in these areas successfully. Many of them later died of starvation and sickness.
When then President Ferdinand Marcos announced that six more dams would be built along the Agno River, the Ibaloi people summoned enough courage to oppose the projects, having learned a sad lesson from the Ambuklao and Binga experience. They succeeded in preventing the construction of the dams.
In the mid-1970s, Ibaloi resistance inspired the Kalinga and Bontok communities to oppose the Chico River Basin Development Project, which called for the building of four dams that would have been far larger than those planned for the Agno. The Kalinga and Bontoc fought and successfully stopped the construction of the Chico dams.
The story of the success of the Chico struggle spread far and wide and inspired other indigenous groups in their own struggles against development aggression in their areas.
In Apayao in 1984, the Isneg people confiscated construction materials and burned equipment to stop the construction of the Gened dam in Flora town. They, too, succeeded as the Ibaloi, the Kalinga and the Bontoc did.
In Ifugao and Nueva Vizcaya in 1985, affected communities successfully aborted the building of the Matuno dam in Banti town.
The indigenous people’s consistent effort to thwart development projects in their areas may be viewed as simply their natural reaction to preserve themselves and to assert their right to self-determination.
As Victoria Tauli Corpuz of the Cordillera Women’s Education and Resource Center pointed out, the Cordillera area is where indigenous people have been living for ages.
“Communities have residential areas with rice fields, and then they have the forest, which is communally owned by the tribe. Those are their hunting grounds, those are where their sacred trees are, those are the areas where the water comes from,” she said.
“These forests are very much protected by the people. They know the forest is where their life comes from, where their water comes from, where the fertility of the soil comes from and where their wood and wild food comes from. So it’s a very integral part of the daily life of the people,” she added.
The San Roque Multi-Purpose dam project pushed through, all right, but opposition against it continues to grow because it also continues to threaten the survival not only of the remaining indigenous communities in its vicinity but also the people in the lowlands once it opens its spillway gates in the future.
According to the Cordillera People’s Alliance, a non-government organization, more and more people, including policy makers, are now realizing that “dam projects usually promise more than they could actually deliver, and at a cost that is too high socially, environmentally, as well as economically.”
As the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism has rightly observed, “Heavy siltation has also taken its toll on the lifespan of the two dams (Ambuklao and Binga), both of which were originally meant to function for 50 years. Today, the 75-megawatt Ambuklao has been reduced to a single generator operating at less than 20 megawatts. Binga continues to operate at its 100-megawatt capacity but at the high cost of dredging operations to rehabilitate its reservoir.”
The San Roque Multi-Purpose dam promises in its website to “reduce the perennial flooding of the Agno River affecting at least 16 Pangasinan and Tarlac towns… for floods up to a 50-year event—that is, one so large as to recur only once in 50 years, peak outflows from the spillway are at least one third (1/3) less than peak inflows to the reservoir.”
In short, with the San Roque dam in place, flooding would be a thing of the past in Pangasinan. But as President Arroyo formally inaugurated the San Roque Multipurpose Dam Project at the Ceremonial Hall in Malacañang on May 29, 2003, at least 23 Pangasinan towns were under the flood waters the dam was supposed to prevent.
ENDNOTES: Former President Fidel V. Ramos was warmly welcomed in the city during his visit last Friday. He played golf, spoke before the city’s five Rotary Clubs, and witnessed the graduation of the Lyceum Northwestern University College of Nursing.
QUOTE: It is not only for what we do that we are responsible, but also for what we do not do. – Moliere (French playwright and actor)
No comments:
Post a Comment