Development from and for the Cordillera

BENCHWARMER
Ramon S. Dacawi

BAGUIO CITY -- There’s wisdom in the push by the City of Tabuk, Kalinga to construct a mini-hydroelectric plant as a renewable energy resource. The local government had applied for a bank loan to build the facility which, when operational, will ensure years of power to the people of Kalinga, literally and otherwise. The plant will be owned by Tabuk and its people.

Hydropower generation is highly feasible and practical in the Cordillera. Otherwise private ventures wouldn’t have stamped their brand of business up here, harnessing resources within our midst and beyond our comprehension to see, much less develop, for our own what we supposedly own. They are applying or had already obtained water rights over our rivers long before our local government units started taking stock of this region’s resources.

Now we buy energy harnessed through our resources by these independent power producers, occasionally with feeble protests over the so-called “power purchase adjustment” (PPA) that allows them to charge us even for electricity not delivered or not used by us.

Here in Baguio, consumers nearly had a similar add-on in their water bills through the unlamented bulk water supply scheme that the Baguio Water District Board, finally found the wisdom to reject.

Under the term of reference, the BWD was supposed to be supplied 50,000 cubic meters every day. Whether or not the BWD would use or distribute that much, it would have to pay for that daily volume.

Had the deal pushed through, the cost of the undistributed or unused water would have been passed on to us, consumers. If the deal materialized, the BWD would also have the basic problem of where to store additional 50,000 cubic meters coming in everyday.

Last time I heard, the city’s daily water requirement was over 50,000 cubic meters, a substantial part of it already being supplied by the BWD’s own wells and new sources.

The long rainy weather since a couple of years back also relieved us of water lack, notwithstanding the great loss to life and property the typhoons in the last two years wreaked on our communities. It relieved the district’s phone operator of those angry calls over household dishes and occupants unwashed in droughts of previous years.

Also, to the relief of the city, its 25-year lease to the BWD of its mini-hydros at Asin expired also a few years back, allowing the local government to finally have what the district, as a broker of sorts, used to get as share from the produce.

That lease stipulated that BWD was to manage the hydros, enabling it to save on the cost of power needed to pump its underground water wells. Without the city’s prior knowledge and consent, however, the BWD transferred the hydro operation to Hedcor, a subsidiary of giant power producer Aboitiz. Under such two-sided arrangement, with hardly a protest from the city, the BWD, without a sweat, continued to receive a share from the energy production.

At end of the city-BWD contract, the local government notified the district about its take-over of the Asinhydros. Instead of thanking the city, the BWD board wrote back to say it was no longer interested to manage the system. Presently, the city operates its facility while working out its management by a private entity through bidding. Hedcor, which has the data crucial to improving the system’s production capacity, remains keen on joining the bid.

Region-wide, our local government units have yet to take the cue and go beyond computing and begging for their share from the exploitation of the Cordilera’s water resources. They have yet to explore the probability of building and owning their own energy plants.

I broached this idea of host communities or local government units building and forever owning power plants to the late Benguet provincial prosecutor Felix Cabading as a talking point during the peace talks for the creation of a Cordillera Administrative Region and eventually an autonomous one.

We missed the boat towards autonomy that would have given us a leverage to impose conditions for further natural resource development in the Cordillera. Over two decades after the peace pact was signed and the interim region installed, we seem content with the administrative set-up.

City mayor Mauricio Domogan has accepted to lead the fresh push for self-rule as chair of the committee to draft an organic act. The Regional Development Council sees autonomy as key to addressing the disparity between our level of development and those of other regions that progressed from the extraction of the gold, silver and copper and the harnessing of the water resources up here. Still, many of our leaders are reluctant to move on towards autonomy that, despite its imperfections, would give us something to improve on.

That regional watershed summit at the end of 2008 could have been the venue for taking stock of our rights over what remains of this region’s resources instead of it partly being triggered by the complaint of the lowlands that their watershed up here is drying up.

For generations, the Cordillera has been the watershed, the resource base for national development. Recently, it has been blamed for the flooding and silting of the lowlands, calamities they say are triggered by the dams and mining activities up here. Lost in that recurrent complaint is the fact these ventures hardly kept us at pace in development with them and the rest of the country.

These are all water under the bridge –about hydro power and gold produced here and delivered to spur development in Metro-Manila and elsewhere. The Cordillera had given so much in the name of national development – at the expense of this region that should now stop crying over spilt milk and stand on its own – like our small-scale miners and vegetable farmers.

It’s time for our regional leaders and local government units to think of and pursue development in terms of our own. It’s long overdue to go beyond begging for what is due and overdue us in terms of national wealth taxes and other benefits and develop our resources for our own benefit.

Of late, reports have it that the Benguet Electric Cooperative plans to venture into mini-hydro development, as Kalinga is also trying to. It is a push in the right direction, and given Beneco’s track record of turning around a problem-riddled system into a class A facility, it can be the beginning towards the region’s sustaining its own development.

There’s also wisdom in rallying the rest of the Cordillera provinces and Baguio to supporting Kalinga’s push to self empowerment through its mini-hydro dam project that will be owned, managed and used by and for its people.

It’s time, too, for the other provinces, Baguio and the RDC to rally behind the fight of Ifugao for benefits due it from the operation of the Magat Dam, something which then Ifugao governor, now Congressman Teddy Baguilat tried to explain during that watershed summit in 2008. (e-mail:mondaxbench@yahoo.com for comments)