The Sy family’s SM Investments Corporation (SMIC) wants to step up its renewable energy portfolio by making the Cordillera one of its stepping stones. SMIC has acquired a contract for a 2000-megawatt (MW) pumped storage hydropower project that will be implemented in the municipality of Pudtol but also affect ancestral lands in other parts of Apayao province. The project’s implementer will be the same company that holds the contract for the two controversial Gened dams which will submerge nearly 1,400 hectares in the municipalities of Kabugao and Calanasan if implemented. This firm is the Pan Pacific Renewable Energy Philippines Corporation, which SMIC acquired recently.
We know how out-of-sight SM’s greed goes. And now, with its 2000 MW project, it will further trample Indigenous peoples’ environmental and ancestral land rights. It will disrupt the natural flow of the Maton and Apayao rivers, which are important to Indigenous Isnag lifeways and livelihood. Such a shame that the UNESCO’s recognition of Apayao last year as the country’s 4th biosphere reserve is being rendered meaningless by all these destructive energy projects. Let us renew our commitment to stop them!”
Earlier this month, the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP) Free Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) Team already held a community assembly about this project in Pudtol. As this 2000 MW project will be under the Energy Virtual One-Stop Shop (EVOSS) law that was passed during the Duterte regime, the FPIC process will be fast-tracked; it will be completed in no more than 105 days from the first community consultative assemblies to the signing of a memorandum of agreement (MOA). The EVOSS law provides that if the affected communities fail to arrive at a consensus favorable to the project, and thus also fail to negotiate terms of agreement that are favorable to them, the project will be implemented anyway. The EVOSS law is a travesty of the FPIC process and a gross violation of Indigenous peoples’ rights!
Placing the project under the EVOSS scheme advances the interests of capitalists like the Sy family and is in line with Marcos Jr.’s plans for the aggressive development of renewable energy in the country. Achieving this development will be at the expense of indigenous peoples – whom Marcos Sr., too, had been all too willing to sacrifice. But Indigenous resistance frustrated the plans of Marcos Sr. Let us also resist and thwart the plans of his son. Aliansa Dagiti Pesante iti Kordiliera
