Life Offered to Death in Exchange for Sustenance

On the surface below the shores of Southern Leyte’s Panaon Island, lies secretively public operations that could be deemed as a life offered to death in exchange for sustenance.

During the 1980s, the Benguet Mining Corporations were in operation in Southern Leyte, particularly in the Panaon Island region. Minerals were limited, thus when it was mined completely, the company left the place with tunnels, shafts, and unemployed miners. The miners opted to find other sources of mineral deposits until they found gold in the shoreline and eventually discovered it spans to the seabed.

In an interview by Jeric Olay, he met Severino, a Surigao native who glides the waves to Southern Leyte to mine gold. Severino has a makeshift hut for him and his coworkers. According to them, several policemen have caught sight of their work and have been playing somewhat “a game of cat and mouse” since their first record of police interference.

Severino and his coworkers have been doing shallow-water seabed quarrying for decades, and are slowly transitioning to deep-sea mining as minerals deplete in the shallow seabed. These are the main categories of seabed mining, both aims to extract minerals but with different seabed depths.

Luckily for Severino, they aren’t the only ones to do this life-taking work for sustenance. In the Philippines, legal seabed mining has been around since 2017-2020, which is led by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, in key areas such as the Celebes Sea and the Philippine Rise. 

A key difference of legality is seen in the scenarios of seabed mining. Sever’s operations are deemed trespassing against the Philippine Mining Act of 1995 Section 43, which states that a permit must be processed before quarrying operations commence. Furthermore, Section 19 of the same act states that quarries are prohibited in areas with marine life.

Severino claims otherwise for Section 19. In the same interview with Jeric Olay, Sever said that issuing a permit is certain to take a lengthy and lavish process. “Mas mabuti nalang ‘pag ganito na kami kaysa sa gan’yan,” Severino added.

Despite the appalling shine of gold, seabed diving comes at a life-taking risk. It does not draw its havoc in environmental distress, but also in possible decompression sickness. It is a medical occurrence in which the absorbed nitrogen into your body due to altitude levels suddenly form bubbles throughout the nervous system. Air bubbles in the nerves and vessels can block the flow of blood cells, which can lead to blood clots, joint pain, dizziness, rashes, and even death. And if there’s anything Sever fears, it is getting entombed in a rockfall and muscle cramps.

The Panaon Divers are clearly not concerned with this as they dub themselves as "professional" in their field. Thus for them, two factors are to be considered in cases of seabed mining; environmental degradation and livelihood. For the Philippines, both are to be considered after the 2023 convention with the Department of Foreign Affairs and the International Seabed Authority.

Both agencies have common-ground concerns with seabed mining. Care for marine life has been a top priority with these organizations who aim to support local livelihood and the betterment of the people in a country. ISA Secretary-General Michael Lodge stated that underwater deposits are more abundant than on land. This is because of sedimentation and current-gliding.

Rocks are weathered into sediments, brought by water currents to various places. These eventually form clusters on the seafloor over time, creating untouched and slowly expanding minerals under the sea. 

But with this in mind, extraction is harmful for aquatic biotic and abiotic relationships such as the stabilization of corals and other marine trees on the seabed. With loss of stabilization comes the decrease in population, further worsening to the decline in marine bioticism. 

In the pursuit of gold and other minerals abundant to the Philippine benthic zones, comes the sacrifice of the same life that contributed to millions of years of sedimentation and clustering of minerals. Sever does business that kills in any mistake he could make. But even so, he still is willing to offer his life to death in exchange for his family’s sustenance.