Liezel Gawid Cajigan . . 8. 3 THE CASECNAN PROJECT The Casecnan multi-purpose dam project is located at Nagtipunan town in Quirino province, near the border between Quirino and Nueva Vizcaya. The height of the dam, which is to be built across the Cagayan river, will be 197 meters. When completed the reservoir will flood 3 600 hectares of land and affect about 20 000 people. The plant will have a capacity of 156 MW. The construction of access roads began in 1990. Through a 26 kilometre tunnel the Casecnan project will be linked to the Pantabangan Reservoir in Nueva Ecija province, to help irrigate farms in Central Luzon. It will supply enough water to irrigate 92 000 hectares of rice fields in Nueva Ecija, Tarlac and Pangasinan. The project is expected to cost 1 260 million US dollars, and the World Bank is considering a 300 million dollar loan to the project (World Bank, 1994). The project site is populated by indigenous Bugkalot. The majority of the 20 000 people who are expected to be affected by the dam are Bugkalot. The other indigenous groups in the area are the Kankanaey, Ibaloi and Ikalahans. These people were displaced in the sixties when two huge dams (Binga and Ambuklao) were built in the neighbouring Benguet province. 3 600 hectares of Bugkalot ancestral land will be flooded by the reservoir. Most of this land is made up of primary and secondary forests. The Bukalots call the forest and the river their ‘market place’. This is where they get everything they need: rattan, herbs, plants, fruits, meat and fish. The Ilogots subsist mainly on slash and burn agriculture, supplemented by pastured cattle, hunting, fishing and gathering of forest products such as rattan. The reservoir will reduce the amount of available land, forcing shorter fallow periods. This inevitably jeopardises the relationship between the Bugkalot’s farming practice and the environment. In addition, forests near the reservoir will be transformed into restricted watershed areas, making hunting and farming - the two main livelihood activities of Bugkalots - illegal. Together these effects threaten the livelihood of the indigenous people. The project package includes the construction of roads which will pass through forested areas with commercially valued trees. This will attract loggers and open the area for other kinds of development. Development which attracts migration threatens to reduce the land of the Bugkalots, if not totally deprive them of their ancestral habitat. Their ancestral land has already been reduced because of migration and government-assigned resettlement sites for other indigenous groups. NPC has offered to compensate the Bugkalots, but past experience related to compensation has been far from satisfactory. Local people are sceptical to compensation and resettlement, especially regarding ‘intangible goods’. In a public hearing in February 1992 at the Nueva Vizcaya provincial capital, Bugkalot representatives said they feared the loss of their ancestral lands and stressed that even a ‘just compensation’ is no compensation for loss of culture and land. The project is a threat to the hydrological and ecological balance of the area. The proposed project site is one of the country’s last remaining forest frontiers. The forest is rich in rattan, bamboo palms and edible wild fruits such as nuts and ferns. Wild pigs, deer, wild chicken, monitor lizards, monkeys, hornbills, wild pigeon and eagles are part of this ecosystem. Turtles and a variety of fish are found in the river. The proposed dam site is crossed by fault lines as it is just a few kilometres from the Digdig and the Casiguran fault lines. The July 1990 earthquake that rocked northern Philippines was traced to tectonic movements of the Digdig fault.
Posted on: Sun, 06 Apr 2014 13:08:16 +0000
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