Manila Bulletin, Philippines : Mammoth ecological hazard

10/06/2003

Mammoth ecological hazard

By Loren Legarda

IT is enough that certain corporations inflict damage on the environment. It is worse when they suck loans from government financing institutions – like behest loans and bailout schemes – under dubious circumstances. They fry the Filipino people in their own lard.

Some of their hazardous projects are the Build-Operate-Transfer/Build-LeaseTransfer schemes. Through these, some companies gorge financial advantages without the slightest sense of responsibility.

Environmental groups have raised serious concerns about this pestilence inflicted by monster corporations. It involves irretrievable loss of our natural resources, rampant illegal logging, forest denudation and soil erosion, water and oil pollution and other forms of ecological perversion.

There are two ways of dealing with this problem. First is to identify the projects that wreak devastation on the environment. Second is to identify companies responsible for these projects, the kind of abomination they inflict, and the degree of their deleterious impact.

The investigation – and it must indeed be an investigation and not just a perfunctory look – of these corporations must include their facilities, organizational structure, financial capacity and technological know-how.

Also within the compass of this investigation is the identification of secondary private entities involved in the implementation of the projects, and of the loans and sovereign guarantees extracted or squeezed from highly-pressured – or conniving – government financing institutions.

The government is in such dire financial straits that every centavo available should be spent on vital public expenditures. Or the nation would sink further in the mire of economic Golgotha, made more tragic by the accompanying ecological holocaust.

We in government must neither take lightly nor ignore this threat to our national well-being. In aid of legislation, and to give a forum to environmental groups, and finally to open the gates of awareness and vigilance among our people and government, I have asked my Senate colleagues, through a formal resolution, to make a public inquiry into this urgent, pressing problem.