The disclosed US–Philippines Critical Minerals Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) confirms what Kalikasan People’s Network for the Environment has long warned, that the Marcos Jr. regime is systematically surrendering Philippine mineral wealth to US imperialism and foreign corporations.
Washington turns the key, while Malacañang opens the door of plunder as the Filipino community pays the price. Signed on February 4 and withheld from the public for seven months, the MOU was only released by the Department of Foreign Affairs after Kabataan Party-list demanded its disclosure during congressional budget deliberations. Its provisions reveal the real purpose of the agreement: to position the Philippines as a dependable supplier of critical minerals and rare earth elements for US strategic supply chains.
The MOU gives the US “first opportunity to invest” in Philippine critical-mineral projects and allows both governments to jointly develop and facilitate projects to secure mineral supplies.It further calls for mineral mapping and measures to develop supposedly “diversified, liquid, and fair markets” for critical minerals and rare earth elements. The MOU serves as a mechanism to ease regulations and processes to facilitate faster extraction of Philippine resources by foreign capital.
The MOU even invokes “sustainable and responsible exploration, mining, processing, manufacturing and recycling.” But no amount of diplomatic language can erase the decades-long record of mining corporations’ environmental destruction and impunity in the Philippines. Mining communities have endured widespread environmental destruction and loss of livelihoods, while indigenous peoples and rural communities have faced displacement and militarization in areas targeted for extraction.The country’s experience with mining demonstrates that “responsible mining” is often little more than corporate greenwashing for an inherently destructive and extractive system.The Marcos regime is now doubling down on this failed model, with the Executive Order No. 122 providing the domestic machinery to operationalize the same agenda. It orders nationwide mineral exploration, establishes mechanisms for faster permitting through a virtual one-stop shop, invokes the “use it or lose it” principle for mining tenements, and accelerates the disposition and privatization of government-owned critical-mineral assets.The said order establishes the machinery for the government to map mineral wealth to subject these areas for extraction and facilitate the transfer of mining assets to private capital.
Government estimates place prospective mineral areas at at least nine million hectares, more than eleven times the land currently covered by approved mining projects. This reveals the real meaning of “critical minerals”. These resources are made critical only to foreign corporations and imperialist supply chains, while bringing destruction and dispossession to Filipino communities.
The MOU and EO 122 effectively transform the State’s constitutional ownership of natural resources into a pipeline for corporate acquisition. The government maps the deposits. It clears the permits. It facilitates the projects. It privatizes public assets. It absorbs and reduces the risks for investors.
And foreign corporations take the profits. Pax Silica completes this chain of extraction through its proposed 4,000-acre “Economic Security Zone,” intended to increase production of inputs vital to US supply chains. This is not national industrialization, with the Marcos regime deepening the country’s colonial pattern of extraction: Philippine minerals out, foreign profits in. EO 122 imposes no meaningful restriction on raw-ore exports, even as the Philippines remains the world’s leading nickel-ore exporter, with around 90% of export value going to China. Decades of mining have failed to build an independent industrial economy, and the US-PH MOU and Pax Silica threaten only to redirect this mineral dependence toward a US-led imperialist bloc.
Regardless of where Philippine minerals are shipped, the country remains trapped in an extractive economy where foreign capital profits while Filipino workers and communities bear the costs. Despite the Marcos administration’s repeated insistence that the agreement is merely a “nonbinding” memorandum of understanding, it is being given the weight and function of a memorandum of agreement as the Marcos administration translates its provisions into executive policies and institutional mechanisms, with policies like Executive Order No. 122, that effectively till the ground for the deeper penetration of US capital and the intensified plunder of Philippine mineral resources. What is presented as a nonbinding framework therefore risks becoming the policy foundation for binding state actions that facilitate imperialist extraction.
Philippine land and mineral wealth are not US strategic reserves or bargaining chips for the Marcos regime. They belong to the Filipino people, and any policy that opens these resources further to foreign control and extraction must be confronted as an assault on national sovereignty and the rights of communities who bear the social and environmental costs of mining.
Kalikasan PNE rejects the Marcos regime’s attempt to present intensified extraction as “economic security,” “responsible mining,” or “critical minerals development.” What is being secured is not the welfare of Filipino communities but the supply of strategic raw materials for foreign corporations and imperialist industries. The Philippines does not need more mining plunder. It needs genuine national industrialization and economic sovereignty that puts the country’s resources and development in the hands of its people.
Junk the US-PH Critical Minerals MOU!
Revoke Executive Order No. 122!
Reject Pax Silica!
Defend national patrimony!
Defend Philippine sovereignty!
Defend communities and environmental defenders!
Reject imperialist plunder and comprador-bureaucrat capitalist betrayal!
