Skilled labor lacking in RP mining boom

PADCAL, Itogon, Benguet (AFP) — As the Philippine mining sector enjoys a long-awaited revival, copper mill manager Libby Ricafort has a problem — rival firms have poached half of the six staff in his metallurgy division.

"Two of them left last year," the Philex Mining Corp. official told AFP. "I lost another one this year."

Mineralogists, geologists, mining engineers and experts in related fields have become the star targets of headhunting firms as foreign investors pour into the Southeast Asian country’s resources sector.

Philex — which operates the country’s lone surviving copper and gold mine under Santo Tomas mountain, and has been in business there since 1958 — has not faced such a hiring crisis for a long while.

"Today the demand for geologists is very high," said Philex environment division manager Redempta Baluda, a former member of the government’s licensing board for the profession.

"There is a gap in the geology and mining (fields) after the mining industry suffered a lull," Baluda, a licensed geologist, told Agence France Presse.

"Prior to this mining boom, the remaining geologists had reinvented themselves and went into teaching or went abroad. But now, my God, finding and hiring one is so difficult," she said.

Metals prices collapsed in the 1990s, and a 1996 copper mine tailings spill in Marinduque province unleashed a nationwide anti-mining sentiment that has not abated despite the passage of a stricter mining code confirmed by the Supreme Court in 2004.

Baluda said just four schools offer geology training in the Philippines, producing 40 graduates a year in a country that has the world’s third largest gold reserves, fourth in copper, seventh in chromite and eighth in nickel.

"Our geologists in the bureau are being pirated by the private sector," where they are offered "more than three or four times" the government salary, Antonio Apostol, head of the lands geological survey division of the government’s Mines and Geosciences Bureau, told AFP.

Geologists are on the frontline of the mineral extraction industry, and are often assigned to remote, inaccessible mountains and streams for months at a time to collect soil and rock samples to test for ore reserves.

Mining engineers then design the method of extracting the resource, while metallurgists analyze core samples from prospect fields and assay the mine’s output.

The Philippines licensed just 2,758 mining engineers between 1927 and 2005, and only 875 remain in the profession, said Luis Sarmiento, director of the Philippine Mine Safety and Environment Association.

"Our profession is going the way of the dinosaurs," he said in a speech at an Asian mining conference in Manila earlier this year.

Recent Philex recruit Venancio Gel Romero is one of just 20 mining engineers who obtained their licenses after taking the 2002 board examinations.

But jobs in his field were then in such short supply that Romero accepted P10,000 a month to work the night shift at an IT call center, fielding queries from befuddled computer users half a world away.

Now the bespectacled 28-year-old Romero fields a tidal wave of job offers, some of them abroad.

"I think this field will become more popular due to the current boom in the mining industry," he told AFP.

However, it takes five years to produce a new batch of engineers — about the same amount of time it takes to get a mine prospect into production.

Sarmiento said two of only five schools that offered the mining engineering degree in the 1990s had stopped the program, while the remaining three are struggling with nearly nonexistent enrollment.

"The gap between supply and demand for mining engineers is widening. This will worsen even further in the coming years," he warned.

Some two dozen mining projects for gold, silver, copper, nickel and zinc are in various stages of development in the Philippines after the 2004 Supreme Court ruling opened the floodgates to about one billion dollars in new investments.

The court ruling practically coincided with the start of the surge in metals prices.

The outlook for rank and file miners is promising here in Padcal village in the Cordillera region of the northern Philippines, where the lowest-ranked Philex employee earns about 44 percent more than the minimum wage and employees enjoy free housing and utilities, medical expenses and education for their children.

About 50 people apply for every job, said second-generation Philex miner Edgar Prangan.

The ancestors of mountain dwelling natives called Igorots — who have been burrowing beneath mountains since before the Spanish colonial conquest in the 16th century — account for about 30 percent of the Philex labor force.

With gums reddened from chewing betel nut to drive away the gloom while driving heavy, mechanized drills and multi-ton loaders in dank tunnels 2,300 feet below the ground, the hardy bunch have helped turn Tuba and Itogon towns into some of the country’s wealthiest per capita.

Philex still employs just under 2,300 people, though the company expects to sustain job creation by producing other prospects within its 14,000-hectare mining concession when the ore body runs out in 2011.