30/11/2025
EDITORIAL | The Earth Bears Grain, Not Gold
Let us not be deceived: the mining exploration in Dupax del Norte is the beginning of dispossession. Recall the previous version of this story in Kasibu: it begins with promises and ends with displacement.
Woggle Corporation, holder of Exploration Permit No. 00030-II issued by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources–Mines and Geosciences Bureau (DENR–MGB), has staked claim over 3,101.11 hectares of land across the barangays of Bitnong, Mungia, Oyao, Inaban, and Parai. On paper, it is a legal document. On the ground, it is a warning.
When Woggle’s personnel attempted to reach the exploration site in Sitio Keon, they were met not with violence, but with a barricade—wood, rope, and conviction standing against machines and money. The blockade near the Keon Barangay Road and along the Aritao–Quirino national highway is a moral line drawn by those who refuse to surrender the land that feeds them to the logic of extraction.
In response, Woggle turned to the courts. It claimed that the barricade caused “irreparable injury,” that exploration is time-sensitive, that delays cannot be repaid by damages. The court agreed and issued a temporary restraining order (TRO), affirming the company’s “right to conduct exploration activities.” But what of the community’s right to say no? What of the irreversible harm to forests, watersheds, and ancestral territories once the drills begin? The argument for corporate injury rings hollow when weighed against the slow violence that mining leaves in its wake.
In its statement, Woggle calls the TRO “a necessary step to ensure compliance with the rule of law” and describes its work as “a government-sanctioned project.” This is the vocabulary of legitimacy. But legality is not the same as justice, and a permit is not the same as consent. What the company calls compliance, the people call coercion. What it calls exploration, they call intrusion.
The Philippine Mining Act of 1995 may grant the state the right to issue exploration permits, but it does not grant any corporation the moral right to unsettle communities or desecrate the soil. The earth is not inert—it breathes. It feeds. It sustains. The 3,101 hectares Woggle claims as a site for mineral prospecting are the same lands where farmers till their food, where children walk to school, where indigenous families trace their lineage through trees and rivers. To treat it as an experimental field for corporate extraction is to amputate memory from their culture.
Let us not confuse development with devastation. We are not against progress, but against the illusion of progress that prioritizes profit over people, legality over legitimacy, and gold over grain. True development nourishes—it does not consume. It sustains communities instead of scattering them. It builds on the soil, not beneath it.
The barricades are not obstructions to the law; they are assertions of life. They stand as testimonies that there are still Filipinos willing to guard the land when institutions refused to. They remind us that the sovereignty of the people cannot be overruled by the signatures of a few.
What must follow now is not compliance with corporate timetables but accountability. There must be full transparency in Woggle’s exploration plans—what minerals are being sought, what risks assessed, what communities consulted. What benefits will be given to the citizens? There must be genuine Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC), untainted by pressure or pretense. Consent that is freely given, not extracted through fear or fatigue. And if the people say no, that refusal must stand.
The issue has not faded with time; it refuses to die because the grievances of the people remain unanswered. As communities and advocates stand in solidarity, the demand for government action is no longer a plea—it is an indictment of neglect. And until the voices of the residents are taken seriously, this movement will only intensify. No passing week or month can bury the ongoing harm inflicted by the state’s inaction and the mining company’s intrusion; if anything, time has only made the injustice starker, louder, and impossible to deny.
It is not merely a local dispute as it exposes how easily the word “development” can be weaponized to mask extraction, and how quickly the law can forget its obligation to justice when faced with the demands of capital.
If we allow this to pass unchallenged, we are not only surrendering land; we are surrendering memory, autonomy, and the right to shape our own future. We are teaching our children that paper permits outweigh living ecosystems, that the rule of law can override the rule of life.
The MARIAN, the official student publication of Saint Mary's University, is one with people of Nueva Vizcaya in saying no to any form of mining and corruption.
