MANILA, Philippines –  The Philippines is likely to lose its tag as the world’s top nickel ore exporter as the government may halt the export of unprocessed minerals as part of efforts to revive the country’s iron and steel industry, an official from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) said yesterday.

DENR Undersecretary Maria Paz Luna said on the sidelines of the 25th meeting of the Mining Industry Coordinating Council (MICC) that the government is set to study the ban imposed by Indonesia as part of efforts to develop a local processing industry.

“We are going to review and consider that. In the long term that will help our economy because that will increase the value added of the products,” she said.

The Philippines overtook Indonesia as the world’s top nickel ore exporter in 2014. During that year, Indonesia banned exports of nickel ore to spur higher value smelting industries.

“We don’t have to import end products and export raw materials. In fact some of our ore being exported are only valued for specific metals when they contain other metals as well,” Luna said.

However, Indonesia is now introducing new rules to allow export of nickel ore.

The government through the Department of Trade and Industry – Board of Investments (DTI-BOI) has laid down the Iron and Steel Roadmap 2015 – 2030 as part of its industrialization process.

“We are going to look at future policies to make sure that our metals are used for national industrialization and for the purposes that we need them for,” Luna said.

DTI Undersecretary and BOI managing head Lucita Reyes said the government is pushing value adding activities and  downstream industries for strategic metal ores.

“The interest of DTI is basically putting more value added on the mineral ores that we are currently exporting to other countries and that is the reason why we have developed the copper roadmap as early as 2015. We have identified certain projects to put more downstream processing of copper ore that is normally exported to other countries,” Reyes said.

Reyes said the DTI has adopted the clustering of small industries at the Philippine Associated Smelting and Refining Corp. (PASAR) located inside the sprawling Leyte Industrial Development Estate (LIDE).

“At the same time we would like to revive the iron and steel industry in the Philippines. We all know that National Steel is closed already. Now we would like to revive that certain industry,” she said.

Reyes told The STAR the government is set to lure investors to help revive the country’s iron and steel industry as the establishment of another state-owned steel company is out of the question.

Juanco Pablo Calvez, chief of the metallurgical technology division of the Mines and Geosciences Bureau (MGB), said the Philippines only produced one million of crude steel that came from scratch but consumer 8.8 million metric tons of steel in 2015.

“The Philippines has been consuming a lot of iron and steel products. We are not producing steel from our mineral ores so that it is now envisioned to reestablish or establish the iron and steel making industry by using the mineral ores chromite in our iron ores to spur development of the Philippines,” he said.