AT least 15,000 members of the Bugkalot indigenous people all over Nueva Vizcaya, Quirino and Aurora on Monday vowed to assert to the “fullest extent as matter of both right and privilege” their claim on the proceeds of the Casecnan Multipurpose Irrigation and Power Project.
At a news conference in Quezon City, Nagtipunan Mayor Rosario Camma of Quirino province said California Energy Casecnan Water and Energy Inc. has not made good on its promise to pay the Bugkalot a royalty for the use of their ancestral domain and water resources of Casecnan River in the past 19 years.
“We have never been paid,” Camma told reporters, even as he cited the issuance of Administrative Order No. 248 by former President Fidel V. Ramos creating a task force to oversee the project.
The river boosts the supply of the Pantabangan Dam in Nueva Ecija.
Multi-billionaire financier Warren Buffett owns CalEnergy through his holding company, the Des Moines, Iowa-based Berkshire Hathaway.
According to Camma, the project began in 1995 under a build-operate-transfer concept designed to irrigate 50,000 hectares of farms in Central Luzon and generate 140 megawatts of power.
He, however, said the project has not irrigated a single square meter of land cultivated by the Bugkalot in Quirino, Nueva Vizcaya and Aurora, and not a single watt of electricity has benefited anyone of them.
“The Casecnan River has dried up,” he noted.
“It is dead. What used to be the primary hub of cultural exchange, festivities and peaceful resolution of conflicts is now a thing of the past. Development projects, such as the Casecnan Dam project, took over the Bugkalot’s ancestral domain with consequences to their cultural heritage and even to their lawful rights under the fundamental law.”
He questioned CalEnergy and its government partner, the National Irrigation Administration, for claiming that it only diverted excess water from the Casecnan and Taan rivers to the Pantabangan Dam.
Under the agreement between CalEnergy and NIA, the USA operator of the $600-million dam would only use 1.6 percent of the total volume of 49 billion cubic meters of the river’s water.
Camma and leaders of the Bugkalot Confederation of Nueva Vizcaya, Quirino and Aurora hit the duplicity of CalEnergy and the incompetence of NIA under Administrator Florencio Padernal.