The concept of "sustainability" is increasingly being emptied of any content, particularly by those who carry out basically unsustainable activities. Among them, mention needs to be made of an activity which is --by definition-- unsustainable: mining. It can be argued that mining is necessary to provide people with a number of goods, but it can certainly not be argued that it can ever be sustainable, being as it is based on the extraction of non-renewable resources.
Bulletín Issue 71 - June 2003
The mining
THE FOCUS OF THIS ISSUE: MINING
Given the serious impacts of mining on forests and forest peoples, we have dedicated this issue of the WRM bulletin entirely to this activity. The first section is aimed at allowing people --particularly those not involved in the issue-- to have a better understanding about the different aspects of this activity. The second section provides detailed country information on a wide range of mining activities and their impacts, as well as on the struggles to oppose them. Finally, the bulletin provides readers with access to relevant contacts and information for further involvement in the issue. We wish to thank all those who assisted us in this task and to pay homage to the countless people throughout the world that are resisting against this destructive activity.WRM Bulletin
71
June 2003
OUR VIEWPOINT
MINING AND MINING-RELATED ISSUES
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30 June 2003Mining is the series of activities referring to the discovery and extraction of minerals lying under the surface of the earth. Minerals can be metal (such as gold and copper) or non-metal (such as coal, asbestos and gravel). Metals are mixed with many other elements, but occasionally large quantities of certain metals can be found concentrated in a relatively small area - the deposit - from which one or more metals can be mined with financial benefit. The impacts of mining are related to mining itself, to the elimination of the residues from the mine, to the transportation of the mineral and to its processing, which frequently involves or produces hazardous substances.
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30 June 2003There is now compelling evidence that mining severely limits a nation's ability to sustain economic growth (even within the narrow definitions usually adhered to by nation states). This is a surprising "discovery" for those who think that "riches" in the ground are unfailingly translated into money in the bank. But for those who adopt an anti-colonialist analysis of capital accumulation, the fundamental reason for the discrepancy is not hard to find. Zaire, Bolivia and Sierra Leone are not merely "poor" -they have been ruthlessly impoverished over hundreds of years. Much of the crippling "foreign debt" carried by the world's "poorest" nations is actually interest supposedly owed on capital which has never been invested in people self-development at all.
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30 June 2003A growing number of new corporate security operations around the world link former intelligence officers, standing armies, and death squad veterans. They go into battle for new bosses: the mineral industries.
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30 June 2003While mining has negative impacts on all those who live in the mining communities in general and those who are affected by the mining operations, there are distinct impacts and added burdens on women. The differentiated impacts can be begun to be understood in concrete situations, such as that faced by a Dayak woman affected by a mine owned by the company PT-IMK in Indonesia.
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30 June 2003Mining companies were shocked by a 'Recommendation' passed by the World Conservation Congress in Amman in 2002, which called for an end to oil, mining and gas extraction from all protected areas in IUCN categories I, II, III and IV ('strict nature reserves', 'wilderness areas', 'national parks', 'natural monuments' and 'habitat management areas'). Many NGOs were equally surprised by the mining industries' reaction: what did the companies think these areas were meant to be protected from if not from unsustainable activities like mining? Indeed some went further, why does the Amman decision implicitly allow mining in protected areas in IUCN categories V and VI -- 'managed landscapes and seascapes' and 'managed resource protected areas'?
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30 June 2003A new report from the Forest Peoples Programme and the TebTebba Foundation calls on the World Bank to drop its support for oil, gas and mining. The report 'Extracting Promises: Indigenous Peoples, Extractive Industries and the World Bank' was compiled as a contribution to the World Bank's Extractive Industries Review (EIR) (the full report and associated case studies can all be found on: http://www.forestpeoples.gn.apc.org/Briefings/Private%20sector/ eir_internat_workshop_synthesis_rep_eng_may03.htm ).
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30 June 2003Mining is a short-term activity with long-term effects. There can be no doubt that when it takes place in forest zones, it is a factor of degradation. It is calculated that, together with oil prospecting, mining is threatening 38% of the last stretches of the world's primary forests. Mining activities are carried out in various stages, each of them involving specific environmental impacts. Broadly speaking, these stages are: deposit prospecting and exploration, mine development and preparation, mine exploitation, and treatment of the minerals obtained at the respective installations with the aim of obtaining marketable products.
LOCAL STRUGGLES AND NEWS
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30 June 2003The colonial period of South African history has left a mindset that encourages the exploitation of anything that can be dug out of the ground and shipped off to feed the rapacious appetites of first world industries and consumers. This is what drove the colonial imperative of England, Portugal, France and Spain in centuries gone by, and although there has been political transformation in previously colonised African countries, the economic forces remain largely unchanged. If anything, achieving independence has resulted in a worse situation, where new governments, under pressure to balance their budgets, have allowed the exploitation of mineral and other resources to accelerate, yet still without achieving economic independence.
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30 June 2003In August 1996 the Tanzanian government authorities in collaboration with a Canadian-owned company called Kahama Mining Corporation Ltd. (KMCL), forcibly removed over 400,000 artisanal miners, peasant farmers, small traders and their families from their land in an area called Bulyanhulu in Shinyanga Region, central-western Tanzania. KMCL was then a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sutton Resources, based in Vancouver, Canada.
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30 June 2003Mining is one of Indonesia's biggest revenue-earners, but it is also destroying the natural resources on which tens of millions of rural and urban Indonesians depend for their livelihoods and health. These resources include the archipelago's once vast forests which are now being destroyed faster than ever before. The problems of mining and forest destruction cannot help but be closely intertwined in Indonesia since so much of the country's land surface is (or used to be) forest, and so much of the rock underneath contains commercially valuable minerals.
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30 June 2003Lead mines are killing ethnic communities and contaminating water sources in the Thung Yai Naresuan Wildlife Sanctuary complex, a World Heritage site, in eastern Thailand. Several Karen ethnic villagers particularly at Lower Klity village have already died from lead contamination while many dozens of people particularly women and children are suffering from acute lead poisoning from drinking, fishing and washing in the Klity stream near the village. Nearly 100 cattle have died and the villagers cannot drink from the stream because it makes them sick. Some forest rangers in Thung Yai believe that wildlife is also suffering as they have seen deer and mousedeer dying in the same way as the cattle.
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30 June 2003Vietnam's karst landscapes are world renowned. Perhaps the country's most famous limestone scenery is at Ha Long Bay, which has been declared a World Heritage Site. In 1962, the karst landscape at Cuc Phuong in northern Vietnam became the country's first national park. As well as producing spectacular scenery, limestone is the main raw material for cement manufacture and many karst landscapes are under threat. Vietnam is no exception.
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30 June 2003The sun sets on the Siria Valley; the temperature is over 38 degrees centigrade. It was always hot here, it is a valley, but never before had the heat reached the levels it does nowadays. The rivers and streams are only a memory, now they look like tracks, deserted and dusty because of deforestation and the extraction of thousands of metres of sand. These are just the beginning of the effects caused by the Mina San Martin mining exploitation in the municipality of San Ignacio, located at some 70 kilometres to the north of the capital city. Here in this municipality, in the village of Palos Ralos, an enormous gold bed has been found, ranging from between 600 thousand and one million ounces of this precious metal.
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30 June 2003The struggle of the people of the town of Esquel, in the Argentine Patagonia, against the intentions of the Canadian mining company, Meridian Gold Inc. to exploit a gold mine in Cerro 21, have been going on for over seven months now. Ranging from mobilizations to "escraches" (mass demonstrations outside the homes of those responsible for the mine), from a plebiscite and legal action to the symbolic closing down of the access to the camp, from the graffitti and murals to the parliaments of the Mapuche People and the "No! Forum". This Cordilleran city, located 2000 km to the south-east of Buenos Aires has become a national reference for the struggle against mining and encroachment by the corporations on the country's economic and political life.
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30 June 2003Presently, the Chilean Patagonia is threatened by a mega-project to be carried out by the Canadian transnational company Noranda Inc., a long-standing mining company that proposes to build one of the largest aluminium reducing plants in the world in the pristine region of Aysen. To give an idea of the dimensions of the damage that the construction of this aluminium plant (known as "Alumysa") will cause, the zone where it is to be installed together with the related works, need to be described.
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30 June 2003During the late seventies Carbocol, a State coal company, revealed the existence of major coal deposits in the Guajira peninsula. The deposits were located in the territory traditionally inhabited by the Wayuu community, an indigenous nomadic people that moved along the region bordering with Venezuela. Following a long controversy on the advisability or not of exploiting this fossil fuel, the State finally gave its authorization to this company under the argument of regional development of energy.
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30 June 2003Misima Island is situated in the Louisiade Archipelago in Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea. The island is 40 kilometres long and 10 kilometres wide at its broadest point, and is covered in lowland hill rain forest except for the coastal zone and the foothills which have been cleared for cultivation and replaced by woodland. With a subsistence farming community of approximately 14,000 people, Misiman society is divided into clans, and membership of these clans is matrilineal. Women traditionally inherit and own land, although senior men retain authority over some areas. It was into this environment that the Canadian-based Placer Dome company introduced its gold mining operations.
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30 June 2003An expanding international coalition of public interest, human rights, labor and environmental groups has vowed to resist mining in Ghana's forest reserves. At a press conference on Thursday 8 of May, to launch a campaign against mining in the reserves, the coalition expressed outrage at the decision of the Ghana government to open up some of the reserves for surface mining. Coalition members called on the government to rescind its decision and withdraw licenses it has already given to some of the mining companies to mine in the forest reserves.