/ENVIRONMENT BULLETIN 1/ CANADA: Canadian-Backed Mines Earning a Reputation in Third World for Destroying Environment

By Pratap Chatterjee Reprint | | Print |

Pratap Chatterjee

VANCOUVER, Apr 6 1996 (IPS) - Two environmental disasters in less than a year have blackened the record of Canadian-backed mines in developing countries.

“Canada is beginning to get a very bad reputation in the Third World for destroying the environment,” says Patricia Adams, a campaigner with the Toronto-based environmental group Probe International.

Some 1,500 people on Marinduque island in the Philippines were stranded for several days last week when 1.5 million tonnes of waste from a copper mine gushed out of a storage pit into a local river. The mine is run by the Philippines’ Marcopper Mining Corporation, in which the Canadian multinational company Placer Dome has a 40 percent stake.

This pit started “emptying like a bathtub into a drain”, Hugh Legatt, a spokesman for Placer Dome in Vancouver told IPS. “It’s a major black eye for us.”

Last August, the holding pond at the Omai gold mine in Guyana broke, and some four billion litres of cyanide-laced waste spilled into a tributary of the country’s Essequibo River.

The mine was insured for 49.8 million dollars against political risk by the Export Development Corporation of Canada (EDC) and re- insured by the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), an affiliate of the World Bank. Ironically, the mine was owned by Placer Dome before it was bought by its present owners Cambior of Montreal, Canada, and Golden Star Resources of Denver, Colorado.

Canada’s EDC says that it does not require environmental assessments when it sells insurance cover.

“We are insuring Canadian investors against civil war or nationalisation,”said EDC spokesman Rod Giles. “Hypothetically, if the local people were to shut down any mine that we insured because of environmental problems, we would reimburse the company not the local people.”

“We did not ask Monenco Agra, a Canadian company, for environmental assessments when we gave it a 12-million-dollar loan to supply equipment for the Three Gorges dam in China, nor did we ask for such as assessment when we insured a billion-dollar sale of a CANDU atomic reactor to Romania,” Giles argued.

Probe reported six years ago that Marcopper’s previous operations in Marinduque, a small island some 170 kms south of Manila, had been an environmental disaster for local fishing communities.

Marcopper had bulldozed half of the 700-metre high Tapian mountain in Santa Cruz, Marinduque to extract copper and gold. Orginally, the company dumped its waste in the San Antonio pond. When copper was discovered under this pond in 1975, the waste was discharged into the ocean.

This “submarine” disposal system resulted in the dumping of some 145 million tonnes of mine tailings or waste into the Calancan bay, killing marine life on almost 50 sq. kms of the sea floor and threatening the main source of income for some 12,000 fish workers and their families.

Probe says that local people complained of skin ailments and respiratory diseases, nausea, vomiting, dizziness, and even paralysis after eating shellfish from the bay.

Benjamin Alafante, secretary for the community of Botilao, told a reporter from the Philippine Centre for Investigative Journalism, that fish catches had dropped from 20-30 kilogrammes a day to barely enough to feed families.

When Marcopper opened in a new mine in 1992, local church and fishing communities forced the company to stop its practice of dumping in the ocean. The company then decided to dump the waste in the gaping pit left by the previous mining operations, even though estimates at the time indicated that the pit would fill up as early as 1997.

The Sep. 1990 Probe report pointed out that the new mine “could compound the ecological disaster and human suffering,” adding that, “given Marcopper’s track record, there is considerable room for doubt whether an adequate tailings will ever be set up.”

Filipino government officials reacted by warning villagers not to draw drinking water from nearby wells. Helicopters ferried relief goods to the stranded inhabitants who would normally cross the river to get to the town centre.

Ted Gabor, Marcopper vice-president for human resources and legal affairs in Manila, told IPS the copper ore mill might have to be shut down for up to a month.

“Fortunately, the pit stopped leaking this weekend of its own accord,” he said. “We think that something has jammed the tunnel and we are now lowering a concrete plug into the pit to make sure it stays that way.”

Gabor said the company was using bulldozers to move the waste from the river bed. The company was also constructing a temporary, four-km levee further down the river to prevent the waste from affecting local agriculture.

Placer Dome’s Legatt described the waste as “quite inert”, adding that “it is not toxic or dangerous, just unsightly. It sounds a lot worse than it actually is.”

Another mine, backed by Placer Dome, has come under attack recently. The Porgera mine in Enga province of Papua New Guinea discharges 40,000 tonnes of waste into the Maiapam-Strickland River.

A study by the Sydney-based Mineral Policy Institute says up to 133 unusual deaths between 1991 and 1993 were reported by local administrators near the Porgera mine. The report says that local people believe these deaths were due to contamination of water and riverside gardens by the mine.

The Placer Dome mine on Misima island in Papua New Guinea has also come under attack. Here, the company discharges its waste directly into the ocean.

Within weeks of the mine opening in 1989, the waste discharge had caused a “serious health threat” according to Jim Yer Waim, environment minister in Papua New Guinea.

The World Bank’s MIGA recently approved political risk insurance for a new gold mine on Papua New Guinea’s Lihir island. The mine, to be run by the British multinational company Rio Tinto Zinc, plans to dispose its waste directly into the ocean. MIGA says it is happy with the environmental impact assessments that have been conducted on the island.

For Canada’s part, the Export Development Corporation has no immediate plans to conduct envrionmental impact assessments.

“We would like to conduct these assessments if other countries do the same. Otherwise, we will be at a competitive disadvantage,” said the EDC’s Giles. “Canada has initiated discussion at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris for an international standard. When there is an international standard, we will comply with it.”

The EDC spokesman refused to comment on the fact that MIGA and the U.S. government’s Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) already require these assessments.