06/11/2025
Dolomite Truth: Mining in Cebu Long Preceded Duterte
There’s a persistent narrative circulating online that the dolomite mining in Cebu was a creation of the Duterte administration.
This claim, however, is not only false—it reveals how easily historical context is erased when political agendas take over public discourse.
Let’s get the facts straight.
Dolomite mining in Cebu did not begin under Rodrigo Duterte. The operations in Barangay Pugalo, Alcoy date back to the early 1980s, long before Duterte even entered national politics.
The Dolomite Mining Corporation (DMC) and the Philippine Mining Service Corporation (PMSC), both established during the Marcos Sr. era, have been extracting and processing dolomite for export for over four decades.
These companies supplied industries in Japan, Korea, and other countries, providing materials for glass, steel, and construction—long before the word “dolomite” became a political buzzword.
What the Duterte administration did was use processed dolomite sand from these long-running operations for the Manila Bay rehabilitation project in 2020.
The dolomite was not newly mined because of Duterte. It was simply sourced from an existing, legally operating site that had been in production since the 1980s.
To pin the origin of the mine—or the environmental issues associated with it—on Duterte is to ignore decades of documented mining activity that persisted under multiple administrations.
The outrage, therefore, is misplaced. If the concern is environmental degradation, the call should be for consistent environmental monitoring and rehabilitation, not selective political blame.
For decades, Cebu’s dolomite industry has existed with minimal public attention, only to be sensationalized when it became convenient to weaponize it against a sitting president.
The truth is simple, dolomite mining in Cebu is a legacy industry, not a Duterte innovation.
Accountability for its regulation spans generations of leaders, not just one administration.
To pretend otherwise is to rewrite history for political gain—and that kind of mining, the mining of truth, is far more dangerous.
