Representatives of a dozen environmental organisations, united in the Roundtable Against Metal Mining in El Salvador, speak out against Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele’s goal to reopen this industry, banned by law since 2017. Credit: Roundtable Against Metal Mining in El Salvador

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Dec 10 2024 (IPS)

Metal mining has a renewed momentum in Central America, encouraged by populist rulers who, in order to soften environmental damage, claim they can develop it in harmony with nature, which is hard to believe

Thus, they seek to win the approval of a majority that seems to follow them blindly, but not environmentalists or other social sectors, activists told IPS.

“The mere popularity of President Bukele is not enough to say that the mine will not contaminate the country,” Rodolfo Calles, an activist with the Association of Salvadoran Community Promoters, told IPS, referring to the interest shown by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele in reactivating metal mining, which has been banned for seven years.“The mere popularity of President Bukele is not enough to say that the mine will not contaminate the country”: Rodolfo Calles.

Central America, an isthmus of six nations and 64 million inhabitants, is one of the most environmentally vulnerable regions, where activists and social defenders have been warning for decades about the negative impacts the metal mining industry has had on their ecosystems.

As a result of these struggles, a law banning all forms of metal mining was passed in El Salvador in March 2017, the first measure of its kind in the world and considered a historic milestone.

Costa Rica had done the same in 2010, but only for open-pit mining, and other countries have halted specific projects, such as in Guatemala and Honduras, and Panama last year.

Central America is a region rich in biodiversity and natural resources. It has abundant water and forests as well as mineral resources. With the exception of Belize, the only country without significant mineral deposits, significant quantities of metals such as gold, silver or zinc, as well as nickel, copper and other minerals can be found in all territories.

But several studies indicate that the mining industry’s economic contribution is minimal in the area, and in the case of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, it has not exceeded 1% of their gross domestic product (GDP). GDP per capita in the region is around US$6,000.

Guatemala is the Central American country with the greatest mineral wealth, metallic and non-metallic, while Panama and El Salvador have much lower concentrations of mineral elements of interest, according to a study.

Panama saw its largest protests in three decades, against the largest copper mine in Central America. As a result, in November 2023, a law established an indefinite moratorium on mining. Credit: Luis Mendoza / Mongabay

Going backwards

Now El Salvador and Costa Rica, ruled by leaders labelled as populist, are taking steps backwards.

“Bukele launches the issue because he relies on the credibility he claims to have as president and people’s misinformation,” Calles stressed.

Despite his authoritarian nature, the president continues to enjoy broad popular support, according to all opinion polls.

Meanwhile, Costa Rican President Rodrigo Chaves announced on 27 November that he had submitted a bill to the unicameral National Assembly to reverse the ban on open-pit mining, setting off alarm bells in a country renowned for its efforts to preserve the environment.

The intention is to finally give the green light to a gold mine that had already won a concession but was cancelled when the 2010 ban came into force, based on the constitutional premise that citizens have the right to live in a healthy environment.

The mine is located in the town of Crucitas, in the province of Alajuela, in the north of the country. It is owned by the Canadian consortium Infinito Gold.

But President Chaves wants to reverse the ban.

“Right now we are just seeing how we are going to counteract what is coming,” Erlinda Quesada, a Costa Rican environmentalist with the National Front of Sectors Affected by Pineapple Production, an organisation that, among other things, seeks to protect water sources from intensive monoculture production, told IPS.

In a telephone conversation from the town of Guácimo, in the province of Limón, in the northwest of the country, Quesada added: “It is no secret to anyone that we have a populist government that… is ingratiating itself with these humble sectors, the poorest in the country, and holding them in its hands” when it wants to approve the proposal.

Meanwhile, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega intensified his relationship with China by granting, also on 27 November, the fifth concession to Xinjiang Xinxin Mining Industry.

The new 1,500-hectare mining project is located between the municipalities of Santo Domingo and La Libertad, in central Nicaragua. In all, the consortium’s operations cover 43,000 hectares.

These concessions granted by Ortega’s dictatorial regime would appear to be, in addition to the economic benefit, a move to tighten links with China and annoy the United States, which is seeking to curb the Asian power on the world geopolitical stage.

In September 2022, the people of Asunción Mita in eastern Guatemala voted against the Cerro Blanco mining project owned by Elevar Resources, a subsidiary of Canada’s Bluestone Resources. The ‘no’ won. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Bukele’s economic hope

Out of the blue, Bukele posted a message on the social network X on 27 November showing his interest in the country’s return to the extractive industry, arousing concern among social sectors that, after a long struggle, had succeeded in getting the Legislative Assembly to ban mining in March 2017.

“We are the only country in the world with a total ban on metallic mining, something that no other country applies. Absurd!” the president wrote.

He added that this wealth can be harnessed responsibly to bring “unprecedented” economic and social development to the Salvadoran people.

That development is what he has promised to deliver in his second five-year presidential term, beginning in June 2024, after winning the elections in February amid sharp criticism that the constitution did not allow him to participate in a second, consecutive election.

Then, on 1 December, in a public act, the president tried to justify his extractivist project stating that the country’s mining potential is enough for an accumulated wealth of three trillion dollars, equivalent to 8,800 % of the current Salvadoran GDP.

There are around 50 million ounces of gold in the subsoil, equivalent to 132 billion dollars at current value. But it’s not just gold and silver, he said.

“According to our initial studies, we have found metals of the fourth industrial revolution, such as lithium, cobalt and nickel, which are used to make batteries for electric vehicles and renewable energy storage,” he claimed.

Rare earth minerals, used for advanced electronics, wind turbines and electric vehicle motors, as well as platinum, palladium and iridium to produce hydrogen and catalytic converters, among others, have also been detected, he added.

Bukele said there will always be environmental impacts in any development project, but they can be minimised. As his New Ideas party controls the Legislative Assembly, it would be very easy for him to revive mining in El Salvador.

An anti-mining banner at a church in El Salvador. Social mobilisation against mining projects has been key in trying to stop the operations of these consortiums and prevent soil and water contamination in the communities. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Cheerful accounts

“The president is making happy accounts of the supposed economic benefits that would be obtained, but he is not accounting for the real damage that would be done to the ecosystems,” said Calles, a Salvadoran who has been fighting against the mines for years.

He added that when the ban on mining in the country was being discussed, Bukele was already involved in politics, and knew there were studies showing that the industry was unfeasable in El Salvador because of its negative impacts on water, soil and people’s health.

“I don’t know where he gets the idea that the impacts will be less. What we know is that mining extraction techniques have not changed significantly, and cyanide, for example, is still being used,” he said. This is a chemical compound that, if misused or unintentionally leached into bodies of water, can be lethal.

Central America’s experience with the extractive industry is negative and long-standing, as in other regions of the world.

At a forum organised in 2009 in San José, Costa Rica, by the Latin American Water Tribunal, the regional experiences of open-pit mining in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Peru were analysed and testimonies were heard about the adverse effects in these countries.

These included testimonies from representatives of the Honduran Association of Non-Governmental Organisations and the Environmental Committee of the Siria Valley, where the San Martín mining project, run by Minerales Entre Mares de Honduras, was operating at the time. It was shut down in 2008.

In 2022, the international organisation Oxfam stated that the mine left behind “a trail of complaints about human health (…), as well as reports of contamination and destruction of flora, fauna and local ecosystems; economic, social and cultural damage to the communities”.

Meanwhile, in late 2023, Panama ordered the closure of the largest copper mine in Central America, operated by Minera Panama, a subsidiary of Canada’s First Quantum Minerals. This came after the courts ruled that the concession contract was unconstitutional.

The closure was the result of massive social protests, due to allegations of serious environmental contamination, and led the government to promote a law establishing moratorium on mining activity in the country for an indefinite period of time.

In Guatemala, social mobilization led to court rulings that stopped the country’s main mining projects.

“The most emblematic projects have been suspended by the Constitutional Court, whose members, although corrupt, accepted that the companies never complied with two fundamental requirements: providing information to the community and holding citizen consultations,” Julio González, of the Madreselva Collective, told IPS from Guatemala City.

González added that these include the nickel mine owned by the Solway Investment Group, located in the municipality of El Estor, and El Escobal, owned by the Canadian company Pan American Silver, near San Rafael Las Flores, both in the east of the country.

The Progreso VII Derivada mine, known as La Puya, owned by Exploraciones Mineras de Guatemala, in the central-south department of Guatemala, as well as Cerro Blanco, owned by Canadian Bluestone Resources, located in the vicinity of Asunción Mita, in the eastern department of Jutiapa, have also been added to the list.

González questioned the authenticity of the environmental impact studies carried out by the mining consortiums, as they are based on a specific, very restricted geographical area.

“The biggest lie are these environmental impact studies, carried out in the so-called areas of influence, which is the place where the mine is located and the three or four surrounding villages, but the water, which is going to be contaminated, goes far beyond this area of influence,” he said.

On El Salvador’s backtracking on the possible reactivation of mining, he added: “What I see is Bukele’s alignment with the hegemonic economy, which is not exercised by the US government but by US corporations”.

A mountainous landscape in the area of the headwaters of the Velhas River, where "barraginhas", the Portuguese name for holes dug like lunar craters in the hills and slopes, prevent erosion by swallowing a large amount of soil that sediments the upper reaches of the river, in the southeastern Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
BELO HORIZONTE/ITABIRITO, Brazil , May 19 2022 (IPS)

The southeastern Brazilian state of Minas Gerais owes its name to the main economic activity throughout its history: mining – of gold since the 17th century and later iron ore, which took on an industrial scale with massive exports in the 20th century.

The so-called Iron Quadrangle, a mountainous area of some 7,000 square kilometers in the center of the state, concentrates the state’s minerals and mining activity, long questioned by environmentalists, who have been impotent in the face of the industry’s economic clout.

But the threat of water shortages in Greater Belo Horizonte, population six million, along with two horrific mining accidents, reduced the disparity of forces between the two sides. Now environmentalists can refer to actual statistics and events, not just ecological arguments.

Belo Horizonte, the capital of the state, experienced an unprecedented water crisis in 2014 and 2015, during a drought that affected the entire southeast of Brazil.

“For the first time we experienced shortages here that only the semi-arid north of the state was familiar with,” said Marcelo da Fonseca, general director of the Mining Institute of Water Management (Igam).

On Jan. 25, 2019, a tailings dam broke in Brumadinho, 35 kilometers from Belo Horizonte as the crow flies. The tragedy killed 270 people and toxic sludge contaminated more than 300 kilometers of the Paraopeba River, which provided 15 percent of the water for the Greater Belo Horizonte region (known as RMBH), whose supply has not yet recovered.

On Nov. 5, 2015, a similar accident had claimed 19 lives in Mariana, 75 kilometers from Belo Horizonte, and silted up more than 600 kilometers of the Doce River on its way to the Atlantic Ocean. (The river, whose waters run eastward, do not supply the RMBH.)

Two years of drought, in 2014 and 2015, frightened the population of Greater Belo Horizonte, the capital of the state of Minas Gerais in southeastern Brazil. For the first time the threat of water shortages was felt, said the director general of the Minas Gerais Water Management Institute, Marcelo da Fonseca. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Mining hazards

Minas Gerais has more than 700 mining tailings dams. The latest data from the State Environmental Foundation (Feam) show 33 in different degrees of emergency, four of which are at level three – high risk and mandatory evacuation of endangered residents – and nine at level 2 – recommended evacuation.

“We are hostages of the mining companies, they occupy the territory and make other economies unviable,” said Camila Alterthum, one of the founders and coordinators of the Cresce Institute and an activist with the Fechos, Eu Cuido movement, promoted by the Rio de las Velhas Watershed Committee.

Fechos is the name of an Ecological Station, a 603-hectare integral conservation area belonging to the municipality of Nova Lima, but bordering Belo Horizonte.

“There are mountains here that recharge the Cauê aquifer, which supplies more than 200,000 inhabitants of southern Belo Horizonte and a neighborhood in Nova Lima,” an adjoining municipality, said Alterthum, who lives in Vale do Sol, a neighborhood adjacent to Fechos.

Activist Camila Alterthum is opposed to mining, which she says is a permanent threat to the destruction of nature and water sources. She is fighting to expand the Fechos Ecological Station, whose forests contribute to the water supply for more than 200,000 inhabitants of Belo Horizonte, in southeastern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Her movement presented to the Minas Gerais state legislature a bill to expand Fechos by 222 hectares, to provide more water and preserve local biodiversity.

But Vale, Brazil’s largest mining company, aims to expand its two local mines in that area.

In order to acquire the land, it is offering double the number of hectares for conservation, a counterproposal rejected by the movement because it would not meet the environmental objectives and most of it is an area that the company must preserve by law anyway.

A fiercer battle was unleashed by the decision of the Minas Gerais government’s State Environmental Policy Council, which has a majority of business and government representatives, to approve on Apr. 30 a project by the Taquaril company to extract iron ore from the Curral mountain range.

Forestry engineer Julio Carvalho, of the Itabirito municipal government, stands next to a “barraginha” on a private rural property, whose owners joined the municipal effort to contain soil loss and river sedimentation in this area of southeastern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

This mountain range is the most prominent landscape feature of Belo Horizonte, in addition to being important in terms of water and environmental aspects for the capital, although it is located on its border, on the side of the municipality of Nova Lima. The mining threat triggered a huge outcry from environmentalists, artists and society in general.

Droughts and erosion

There are other threats to the RMBH’s water supply. “We are very close to the springs, so we depend on the rains that fall here,” Fonseca told IPS at Igam headquarters in Belo Horizonte.

Two consecutive years of drought have seriously jeopardized the water supply.

Two basins supply the six million inhabitants of the 34 municipalities making up Greater Belo Horizonte.

The Velhas River accounts for 49 percent of the water supply and the Paraopeba River for 51 percent, according to Sergio Neves, superintendent of the Metropolitan Business Unit of the Minas Gerais Sanitation Company (Copasa), which serves most of the state.

The Paraopeba River stopped supplying water after the 2019 accident, but its basin has two important reservoirs in the tributaries. The one on the Manso River, for example, supplies 34 percent of the RMBH.

The phenomenon of “voçorocas” (gullies) is repeated in several parts of Itabirito and Ouro Preto, the municipalities where the Velhas river basin originates, in southeastern Brazil. The soil is vulnerable to erosion and measures to mitigate the damage are finally beginning to proliferate in a region dominated by iron ore mining. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

The Velhas River only has a small hydroelectric power plant reservoir, with a capacity of 9.28 megawatts, but it is generating only four megawatts. It is run-of-river, that is, it does not store enough water to regulate the flow or compensate for low water levels.

In addition, sedimentation has greatly reduced its storage capacity since it began to operate in 1907. The soil upstream is vulnerable to erosion and has been affected by urban and agricultural expansion, local roads and various types of mining, not only of iron ore, which aggravate the sedimentation of the rivers, said Fonseca.

Decentralized solutions

The municipal government of Itabirito, which shares the headwaters of the Velhas basin with Ouro Preto, the gold capital in the 18th century, is promoting several actions mentioned by Fonseca to mitigate erosion and feed the aquifers that sustain the flow of the rivers.

Businessman and environmentalist Ronaldo Guerra stands on his farm where he promotes ecotourism and exhibits his proposal for a succession of small dams as a mechanism for storing water on the surface and in the water table, strengthening the forests and the hydrographic basin in a mining region of southeastern Brazil where there is growing concern about the water supply. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

It is intriguing to see craters in some rural properties in Itabirito, especially on hills or gently sloping land.

They are “barraginhas”, explained Julio Carvalho, a forestry engineer and employee of the Municipal Secretariat of Environment and Sustainable Development. They are micro-dams, holes dug to slow down the runoff of rainwater that causes erosion.

This system prevents a large part of the sediment from flowing into the rivers, as well as the phenomenon of “voçorocas” (gullies, in Portuguese), products of intense erosion that abound in several parts of Itabirito and Ouro Preto, municipalities where the first tributaries of the Velhas are born.

As these are generally private lands, the municipal government obtains financing to evaluate the properties, design the interventions and put them out to bid, in agreement with the committees that oversee the watersheds, Carvalho told IPS.

The municipality of Itabirito is the “water tank” of Belo Horizonte, the capital of the state of Minas Gerais, in southeastern Brazil. The municipal government is promoting programs aimed at revitalizing the watershed that supplies nearly half of the six million inhabitants of Greater Belo Horizonte, explains Frederico Leite, environmental secretary of the municipality, which depends on mining activity. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

For country roads, which generate a great deal of erosion in the undulating topography, “dry boxes” are used, as well as small holes in the banks to retain the torrents or at least curb their speed, he said.

Other “mechanical land use and conservation practices” include recovering water sources through reforestation and fencing to prevent animals from invading water sources and trampling the surrounding areas.

Itabirito is also seeking to dredge the river of the same name, which crosses the city, to reduce sedimentation, which was aggravated by flooding in January, when the water level in the river rose unusually high.

Environmental education, a program of payments for environmental services and the expansion of conservation areas, in the city as well, are the plans implemented by Felipe Leite, secretary of environment and sustainable development of Itabirito since 2019.

“We want to create a culture of environmental preservation,” partly because “Itabirito is the water tank of Belo Horizonte,” he told IPS.

The municipal government chose to cooperate with the mining industry, especially with the Ferro Puro company, which decided to pave a road and reforest it with flowers as part of a tourism project.

In São Bartolomeu, a town in the municipality of Ouro Preto, Ronald Guerra, an ecotourism entrepreneur, proposes a succession of small dams and reservoirs as a way of retaining water, feeding the water table and preventing erosion.

On his 120-hectare farm, half of which is recognized as a Private Natural Heritage Reserve –a private initiative conservation effort – he has 13 small dams and raises fish for his restaurant and sport fishing.

The son of a doctor from Belo Horizonte, he opted for rural life and agroecology from a young age. He was secretary of environment of Ouro Preto and today he is an activist in several watershed committees, non-governmental organizations and efforts for the promotion of local culture.

"No to lithium" reads a sign erected in Salinas Grandes by local indigenous communities, who depend on the salt flats for tourism and to harvest salt, in the northwest of Argentina. In February 2019 they blocked the nearest highway, which runs to Chile, for nearly two weeks, halting exploration for lithium by a mining company. Credit: Daniel Gutman/IPS

By Daniel Gutman
OLAROZ, Argentina , Dec 18 2019 (IPS)

The intense white brightness of the salt flats interrupts the arid monotony of the Puna in northwest Argentina, resembling postcards from the moon. Beneath its surface are concealed the world’s largest reserves of lithium, the key mineral in the transition to clean energy, the mining of which has triggered controversy.

The debate is not only about the environmental impact but also about how real are the benefits for the local communities of this region located more than 4,000 metres above sea level, where people unaccustomed to the Andes highlands have a hard time breathing.

“I have no doubt that our province is destined to play a key role in the coming years, which will be marked by the abandonment of fossil fuels,” Carlos Oehler, president of the Jujuy Energy and Mining State Society (Jemse), told IPS.

“It’s an opportunity for development. And the people who only emphasise the environmental impact do so out of ignorance,” he argued, at the company’s headquarters in Salvador, the capital of the province of Jujuy.

Jemse, which is owned by the province – bordering Bolivia and Chile – has been producing lithium since 2014 in the Olaroz salt flats, through Sales de Jujuy, a public-private partnership with Australia’s Orocobre and Japan’s Toyota Tsusho.

The participation of Toyota Tsusho – part of the Toyota conglomerate – is a reflection of the international interest in lithium for the production of batteries for electric vehicles, a market expected to boom in the coming years in industrialised countries.

The impact of lithium mining in the Puna region of Jujuy is limited for now and differs depending on the area, IPS saw first-hand during a several-day tour through the scattered towns and villages of this rugged Andes plateau region.

Several of these communities, mostly populated by indigenous Kolla people, became Solar Villages this year – a provincial project that harnesses the abundant sunlight of the Puna region to bring electricity to remote villages.

A few km from the Salar de Olaroz salt flats is the village of the same name, made up of a few dozen adobe houses and reached by a desolate dirt road.

A street in Olaroz, the village near the salt flats of the same name in the northwest Argentine province of Jujuy, where lithium mining provides stable work for some of the local inhabitants, in an area where communities have traditionally raised llamas and sheep for a living. Credit: Daniel Gutman/IPS

A few “pros”…

Last year, the town’s first secondary school opened its doors. It is a vocational-technical institution with an orientation in chemistry, which aims precisely to train young people about lithium.

In addition, lithium has brought stable jobs to a poor region, where a majority of the population depends on llama and sheep farming. Mirta Irades, principal of the Olaroz primary school, told IPS: “Everyone here wants to work at the mining company, even if it’s just washing the dishes.”

The real benefits, however, are modest. According to a report presented by the national and provincial governments in November, only 162 people, or 42 percent of those working in the Sales de Jujuy company, come from local communities.

In total, the document says, direct mining employment in Jujuy increased from 1,287 jobs in 2006 to 2,244 in 2018, with lithium mining accounting for three-quarters of the growth. That is just 3.5 percent of registered employment in the province, although wages are more than double the overall average.

The timeframes involved in lithium production are another hurdle.

Sales de Jujuy is the only company in the province that is commercially mining lithium. There are dozens of other companies working, but exploration, pilot tests, the installation of processing plants and other previous tasks can take up to 10 years.

Two men from indigenous communities near Salinas Grandes pick up bags of salt harvested by members of the local cooperative. Villages around Salinas Grandes have blocked attempts to mine lithium in the area. Credit: Daniel Gutman/IPS

There is only one other company already mining lithium in the entire northwest of Argentina, which is also made up of the provinces of Salta and Catamarca.

This is the area that, along with northern Chile and southern Bolivia, comprises the so-called Lithium Triangle, which concentrates 67 percent of the world’s proven reserves of the mineral, with Argentina at the head, according to data from the U.S. Geological Survey.

…and several “cons”

But those who are skeptical about lithium’s potential for the region point out that South American countries are once again falling into the role of mere producers of primary products, as in the case of agricultural and livestock exports.

This is crudely reflected in Olaroz, one of the Solar Villages that is supplied with electricity by a small local solar park, which like the others in the programme runs 24 hours a day thanks to lithium batteries.

But the batteries are imported from China, since neither Argentina nor the rest of South America has the technology to manufacture them.

When you walk through communities in Jujuy’s Puna region, there are places where people don’t even want to hear lithium mentioned.

In Salinas Grandes, another giant white sea of salt, located about 100 km from Olaroz, no mining company has been able to gain a foothold due to opposition from the 33 indigenous communities in the area.

Two indigenous women wait for customers at a craft stand in Salinas Grandes, in the Puna highlands region in northwestern Argentina. The tourist routes through the immense salt flats that break up the arid landscape here are an alternative created by the local indigenous communities to boost their income. Credit: Daniel Gutman/IPS

“This is our territory, we decided that lithium will not be mined here, and they are going to have to respect us,” Verónica Chávez told IPS, while participating in an assembly of some 100 members of indigenous communities in the middle of the salt flats.

Chávez lives in the village of Santuario Tres Pozos, home to some 30 families, and she is a member of the local cooperative that brings together indigenous families who work harvesting salt, using the same techniques their ancestors used for centuries.

“All the promises they make to us with the arrival of the lithium companies are lies. Lithium is food for today and hunger for tomorrow,” adds Chávez.

Local alternatives

Four years ago the communities in Salinas Grandes embarked on another activity: guided tours and the sale of handicrafts to Argentine and foreign tourists attracted by the seemingly endless white landscape that glitters in the sunlight.

Alicia Chalabe, a lawyer for the indigenous populations of Salinas Grandes, says no economic offer will manage to modify the situation. “The communities live close to the salt flats and use the territory, which for them has a very important historical, cultural and patrimonial value,” she told IPS.

“In the Olaroz area, the situation is different because the communities never used the salt flats,” she adds.

A sign marks the entrance to Sales de Jujuy, one of the only two companies that mines and sells lithium in Argentina, the country with the largest proven reserves. It operates in the Olaroz salt flats and is made up of the Australian company Orocobre, Japan’s Toyota and a public enterprise from the province of Jujuy, in the northwest of Argentina. Credit Daniel Gutman/IPS

In February, the communities of Salinas Grandes staged a nearly two-week roadblock on national highway 52, which connects Argentina with Chile, successfully bringing to a halt the exploration work that a lithium mining company had begun in the area without the approval of the local indigenous population.

The resistance in Salinas Grandes is based in part on studies by Marcelo Sticco, a hydrogeologist at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), who points out that lithium extraction puts community water sources at risk in a desert area where rain is a very sporadic luxury.

“The studies we carried out are conclusive,” Sticco told IPS from the Argentine capital. “Lithium is separated through the evaporation of enormous quantities of water, which fuels the salinisation of the groundwater used for consumption in the region.”

The government of Jujuy has a project to add value to lithium in the province: it partnered with the Italian electronics group SERI, which could locally install a battery assembly plant, with the aim of moving towards electric urban public transport.

This initiative, if implemented, could modify a scenario that for now does not offer significant concrete benefits, even though many in Argentina are already counting on the wealth that the so-called “white gold” will bring.

But although Argentina’s lithium exports have been growing, they reached just 251 million dollars in 2018, a mere 6.5 percent of the country’s mining exports.

However, Oehler, the president of Jemse, believes that the peak in international demand for lithium has not yet arrived: “It will peak between 2025 and 2030 and we have to take advantage of it to grow and to improve the lives of our communities,” he said.

But some experts fear the consequences of staking too much on this mineral, which could soon be outdated by a new technology that reduces or eliminates its current attraction.

Lithium has many uses, but it is most coveted as a heat conductor in rechargeable batteries.

These are used in cell phones, in the storage of different renewable energies, especially solar power, and in electric vehicles, the use of which is projected to steadily increase, especially in public transport, as they push aside fossil-fuel vehicles as part of the effort to curb global warming.

Ecuadorian Environment Minister Tarsicio Granizo speaks during an interview with IPS in his office in Quito. Credit: Nina Zambrano/IPS

By Ela Zambrano
QUITO, Jul 20 2018 (IPS)

Ecuador has decided to move towards a bioeconomy-based development model, “which must be sustainable,” because otherwise “the remedy could be worse than the disease,” said the country’s Environment Minister Tarsicio Granizo, who is spearheading this innovative approach.

In this interview with IPS, Granizo explained that the proposal represents a response to an extractivist model which cannot be followed forever. His ministry is working hand in hand with other ministries, productive sectors and the governments of the 24 provinces of this South American country of 17.7 million people.

Ecuador is a megadiverse country, but it is also rich in minerals and fossil fuels. The current model of development is based on its underground riches, but now the aim is to move towards a post-extractivist model, focused on the sustainable use of the country’s biological resources.

As a first step, the government is drawing up an inter-ministerial environmental agenda with the support of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to identify the administration’s current environmental actions, in order to design a new cross-cutting strategy.

The minister pointed out that it is not yet possible to talk about a “transition” or timeframes because “the new forms of economy are just being thought out.” But he stressed that “the concept of the bioeconomy at the state level is already in place.”

IPS: You’re leading what’s called a transition from extractivism and fossil fuels to the bioeconomy. Why?

TARSICIO GRANIZO: The bioeconomy is one of the many ways forward for this country which has an economy based on oil and minerals extraction. There may be other ways out, but let’s remember that we are a megadiverse country and that we have to make sustainable use of our megadiversity, with the highest technology.

IPS: What is the future for mining and oil in this model?

TG: We are talking about a long-term transition, whether we like it or not we have to continue exploiting oil and mining, we still have important resources in both sectors that support the country.

IPS: With a time limit for the exploitation of fossil fuels due to climate change…

TG: There is a deadline for oil exploitation; and, mining will always be there, but it must be organised. We cannot yet say that we are in a process of transition, we have just started thinking about these new forms of economy that will allow Ecuador to leave behind extractivism one day.Of course, not everything bio is necessarily sustainable, because I can replace oil with another product and run out of that product. The sustainable bioeconomy is based on that: the sustainable use of biological resources, and that includes a circular economy in waste management.

IPS: But can you put a timeframe on the goal of implementing the bioeconomy?

TG: We cannot… How long will fossil fuels last?

IPS: Experts say Ecuador’s fossil fuels could run out in 20 years, including officials from your ministry…

TG: Maybe 20 years, but in mining, we’ll have to see how things go for us. Mining revenues have to be greater than the environmental liabilities. In this respect, we cannot yet set timeframes.

IPS: What is the bioeconomy model you envision for Ecuador?

TG: We are thinking of sustainable bioeconomy as a model for which several elements are necessary: conservation, innovation, investment, and markets.

IPS: What comes first?

TG: Conservation. Ecuador’s soil is already conserved, through protected areas, protective forests that cover 30 percent of the national territory. Innovation is where we are most concerned, where we still have a long way to go.

IPS: How is the sustainable use of megadiversity included?

TG: Of course, not everything bio is necessarily sustainable, because I can replace oil with another product and run out of that product. The sustainable bioeconomy is based on that: the sustainable use of biological resources, and that includes a circular economy in waste management.

IPS: You stress the need to move towards a circular economy, one based on produce-consume-recycle rather than produce-consume-throw away…

TG: The circular economy is a part of the bioeconomy, for example waste can be a good business and an alternative for those already working as waste pickers. We see examples in many parts of the world where waste management is an option. What arrives at the treatment centres is minimal, everything stays in the factories. Little by little we have to make progress towards that.

IPS: They say the bioeconomy will favour the development of the most vulnerable segments of society. Is that true? Why and how?

TG: Of course, for example, it is the poor who rummage through and separate the garbage. We need to help them out of poverty and help them become small-scale entrepreneurs and have a better quality of life. We have identified about 500 bio-enterprises; the thing is that most of them are small-scale or pilot projects. We work mainly with the Popular and Solidarity Economy (an economic organisation institutionalised in 2011 in the country, whose members, individuals or groups, are based on cooperation and solidarity).

IPS: Is there an example that serves as a letter of introduction to what Ecuador already does in bio-economics?

TG: There are projects with guadua bamboo cane to make furniture and laminates. This is a fast-growing, abundant resource in the coastal and Amazon regions, which resprouts easily. It is also very interesting what is happening with vicuña wool in (the province of) Chimborazo. Vicuña wool fetches a very high price on the international market. In this country, Chimborazo is the only place where vicuñas (a South American camelid) are found, and that is why we are in the process of teaching local communities how to shear vicuñas, and to treat and use their wool so that it has added value.

IPS: How much does the bioeconomy currently represent in Ecuador, and what share of the country’s GDP is it expected to represent?

TG: Currently the bioeconomy represents about 10 percent of the industrial GDP, and we plan to double that in the coming years.

IPS: In how long?

TG: We are taking a series of measures, we have created the country’s Bioeconomy Network and the 2015-2030 Biodiversity Strategy, we have created an entity with the Private Technical University of Loja to promote bioeconomic initiatives. We are launching the brand BioEcuador.

IPS: Have you encountered resistance in the economic and productive sectors?

TG: Fortunately, the ministries of production, mining and hydrocarbons, and foreign trade are very well aligned. We have managed to position the bioeconomy as a state commitment also in the productive sectors. We have also talked with the banks to establish soft credit lines with certain benefits to promote the bioeconomy in aspects such as nutraceuticals (‘nutrition’ and ‘pharmaceutical’ – natural foods that provide medical or health benefits). The concept of bioeconomy is already positioned at the state level.

IPS: What are the strategies?

TG: To use the rich biodiversity that we have in order to provide economic alternatives for the country. In the bioeconomy we do not rule out the improvement of monocultures, for example we have selected five sectors to work in: oil palm farming, shrimp, flowers, cattle and bananas. We want to reach an agreement with these producers so that they do not expand their agricultural frontier, but improve their productivity within their current range. That’s one aspect.

IPS: Since the bioeconomy is a long-term project, how can we ensure that future governments maintain this direction and do not change it?

TG: As soon as producers see that the bioeconomy is a real alternative, it will not matter which government is in power.

IPS: Is this being established at a legislative and policy level?

TG: It is included in the Organic Environmental Code and above all in the 2017-2021 National Development Plan. We are working on the development of public policies.

IPS: Environmentalists criticise aspects of the bioeconomy, such as the use of biofuels based on monocultures. What is your view on this?

TG: Biofuels have their pros and cons. The problem is that land that should be aimed at guaranteeing food sovereignty is allocated to meet transport needs.

IPS: So you don’t rule out biofuels?

TG: No. I always say that everything can be done in Ecuador as long as it is done where it should be done and is done properly.

IPS: Are there other countries in Latin America looking towards the bioeconomy?

TG: There was a bioeconomics summit in Germany (in Berlin in April), attended by some Latin American countries. Several are in our line of sustainable bioeconomy. Others see the bioeconomy as the improvement of their monocultures. We don’t rule out that possibility either.

IPS: So, Ecuador is betting on different formulas, not only on the bioeconomy?

TG: Of course, we can think about the sale of services; in providing banking services to other countries; and, the sustainable bioeconomy. We have to look for alternatives for post-extractivism.

IPS: So the bioeconomy is one path, although a privileged one…

TG: Yes, but sustainable, it must be sustainable, otherwise the remedy could be worse than the disease.

Excerpt:

Residents of the Eastern Cape's Amadiba coastal area gather in September 2015. Many fear mining would threaten their way of life by destroying grazing land and creating rifts in the community. Courtesy: Nonhle Mbuthuma

By Mark Olalde
PRETORIA, Jun 5 2018 (IPS)

South Africans await judgement to be handed down in a court case that could set a sweeping precedent by empowering communities on communal land with the right to reject new mining projects.

Calling the case a referendum on “the right to say no,” residents of several rural villages along the country’s eastern coast are asking the court to reinterpret current minerals extraction legislation to compel mining companies to gain explicit community consent prior to breaking ground on new operations.

The court case, for which arguments were heard in late April in Pretoria, stems from a dispute over a proposed titanium mine that has raged for more than a decade in the country’s rural Eastern Cape province in an area known as the “Wild Coast.” The project has pitted Australian mining company Mineral Commodities Ltd against a group of five local villages, collectively known as Amadiba. Locals consistently turned back the company’s attempts to mine, but bouts of violence have left several people dead.

“Their way of life is intrinsically linked to the land. Customary communities tend to suffer disproportionately from the impacts of mining,” the plaintiffs argued in their submission to the court, noting environmental degradation, displacement and loss of agricultural land. “Without free, prior and informed consent, they are at real risk of losing not only rights in their land, but their very way of being.”

Nonhle Mbuthuma is the secretary and acting leader of the Amadiba Crisis Committee, which represents many residents of the villages. She took over the group’s mantle of leadership when the committee’s chairperson, Sikhosiphi ‘Bazooka’ Radebe, was gunned down in front of his home in March 2016. Radebe was widely thought to have been murdered for his activism against the mine, and Mbuthuma’s name is believed to be written on a hit list alongside his.

“The land is our identity. When we lose that land, we lose who we are. And when you lose who you are, that’s no different than just someone killing you,” Mbuthuma said.

Nonhle Mbuthuma of the Amadiba Crisis Committee is believed to be on a hit list due to her opposition to a proposed titanium mining project on South Africa’s east coast. Credit: Mark Olalde/IPS

The communities and civil society organizations that have joined the plaintiffs asked that if the court does not side with their argument for consent, that it at least grants them the ability to negotiate terms such as royalties prior to mining. If the court declines that too, then the plaintiffs asked that the current legislation be found unconstitutional.

In the court filings, a subsidiary of Mineral Commodities argued that the plaintiffs misinterpreted the law well beyond its intended purpose in an effort to halt the mine, which already earned permits. The company noted that “if granted, [the plaintiffs’ application] will affect land and mining rights all over the country.”

“We hope that if the judge rules in favor of us, it will help all African communities, not only Xolobeni, because the problem of mining pushing people off their land is all over Africa,” Mbuthuma said, referencing one of the five villages in Amadiba that has become synonymous with the conflict.

Formerly under the control of the oppressive apartheid system, South Africa democratically elected a new government in 1994, which worked to return the country’s mineral wealth to its citizens while also fitting into international, capitalist markets. Under current legislation, mineral rights were claimed for the state in an attempt to foster economic development.

However, as the government handed out mining licenses, conflicts arose between mining companies and rural communities living on communal land. About 13 percent of the country’s land area remains held communally in the vestiges of apartheid-era “homelands” that were created as sham independent states to remove black South Africans from urban areas. An estimated 18 million South Africans live on these lands.

Traditional leaders such as chiefs, kings and queens and councils preside over communal land, but their mandate comes from the people, according to customary law. In this set of laws, these leaders cannot make decisions for their communities without the consent of the people.

In many cases, though, traditional leaders strike deals with mining companies that open up communal land to mining, often without community-level consent. This happened in Amadiba, where one chief supported the proposed mine and was made a director of a company linked to the project. In return, the chief said in a signed statement provided to the South African Police Service, he was promised that challenges to his chieftaincy would disappear and that he would earn profits from the mine.

Through a company spokesperson, Mineral Commodities CEO Mark Caruso declined to comment for this story.

Johan Lorenzen is an associate at Richard Spoor Inc. Attorneys, which is part of the community’s legal team. He said that such conflicts are common in rural areas that are struggling to realize the full benefits of a democratic South Africa.

“The majority of rural South Africans live on communal land such as the Amadiba community. Particularly as the world’s largest platinum producer, South Africa has seen a wave of mining right applications over customary land, and, without clarity over this question of whether there’s the right to say no, it has had sweeping effects on tens-of-thousands of people in rural South Africa,” Lorenzen said. He estimates a judgement will be delivered in several months.

The minister of the Department of Mineral Resources announced an 18-month moratorium that temporarily halted both the project as well as any new permit applications for the area. That is set to expire later this year, and it remains unclear what will happen when it does.

As part of the moratorium, the department committed to commission “independent social specialist/s to…investigate the deeply rooted cause of the problems and document the causes and possible solutions” of conflict surrounding the mine.

In a statement to IPS, the department admitted to eschewing that obligation. “There was no independent investigation conducted, due to the well-publicised challenges between the parties in the area,” the statement said, also noting that the department was yet to decide whether to renew the moratorium.

As an alternative way of elevating these residents’ voices, British photographer Thom Pierce recently shot a series of portraits of Xolobeni residents and made the frames into postcards that he plans to mail to the minister of the Department of Mineral Resources. On the postcards, community members described the importance of holding the final say over their own land.

Themba Yalo invoked the memory of the Pondoland Revolt, a 1960s uprising where residents of Amadiba and surrounding communities took up arms against the apartheid government and its supporters. “My grandparents fought for this land, for me to live freely. I will never agree to a mine coming here and destroying the land and the graves of my family,” he wrote.

Others, including Mamthithala Yalo, argued for agriculture instead of mining: “I have pigs, cows and goats that I farm on this land. I also grow all of the food that I need. I will never allow the mining to come and change the way I live. This land is not for sale.”

The effort to search for lithium in the Salar de Caucharí-Olaroz, in the province of Jujuy, is a project developed by the Exar mining company, a joint venture between Canadian Lithium Americas Corp (LAC) and the Chilean Sociedad Química y Minera (SQM). In total, there are 53 projects in the exploration or project feasibility phases. Credit: Mining Chamber of Commerce of the Province of Jujuy

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Jan 11 2018 (IPS)

The government of Mauricio Macri dreams of Argentina becoming the world leader in lithium production. But it does not seem so clear that this aspiration, underpinned by the interest of multinational corporations, would also drive the development of local communities.

With just two projects in operation, Argentina today contributes some 40,000 tons per year of that key chemical element for batteries that are used around the world in, for example, cell phones and electric cars, representing 16 percent of global production, according to data from Argentina’s Energy and Mining Ministry (MinEM).

But these numbers are expected to increase significantly in the near future, because the main international companies engaged in this business – strongly linked to the energy transition from fossil fuels to clean sources – have already landed in Argentina.

Thus, in the last two years the sector has received nearly two billion dollars in foreign investment, and today there are no less than 53 projects in the phases of exploration or technical and economic feasibility studies, which cover a total area of 876,000 hectares in the northwest of the country, according to MinEM.

“In Argentina what we can do so far is extract lithium carbonate. The problem is that we do not have the technology or the patents for the assembly of the batteries,” economist Benito Carlos Aramayo told IPS.

“As a result, lithium will not change the production model of the northwest of the country, which is the production of raw materials. It will only expand it a little, because today we depend mainly on sugarcane and tobacco,” added Aramayo, assistant dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the National University of Jujuy.

The llama is the animal best adapted to the arid conditions of the Argentinean region of the Puna de Atacama. The photo shows a group of llamas near a salt flat where exploration for lithium is being carried out. Credit: Mining Chamber of Commerce of the Province of Jujuy

Together with Salta and Catamarca, Jujuy is one of the northwestern provinces that account for most of the country’s lithium reserves. In fact, of the 53 projects that are expected to begin to operate soon, 48 are in these three provinces, in the Puna ecoregion.

The Puna is an arid zone, with salt flats that are over 4,000 meters above sea level, which is part of what has been called the “Lithium Triangle”, and includes northern Chile and southwestern Bolivia. In recent years, different scientific reports have pointed out that the region has approximately half of the world’s lithium reserves.

Chile has led the world market in recent years, but at present big investors in the sector seem to be looking towards Argentina, just as global demand for lithium is expected to rise threefold by 2025.

The intense exploratory activity carried out recently in the Argentine Puna increased the country’s lithium reserves, which in 2015 were estimated at 6.3 percent of the global total, compared to 13.8 percent today.

This growth was shown in a report jointly prepared by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and Argentina’s Geological and Mining Service (SEGEMAR), which was made public in late November 2017.

“Argentina can become the world’s leading lithium exporter,” said Tom Schneberger, vice president of FMC Lithium, which through its subsidiary Minera del Altiplano produces some 22,500 tons of lithium a year in the Salar del Hombre Muerto, in the northwestern province of Catamarca.

In November, Schneberger announced investments for 300 million dollars with the objective of doubling the production in the salt flat by 2019, and gave two reasons to justify the company’s expectation: increased global demand and the “clear rules” set by the Macri administration.

“The previous government’s policies offered few certainties,” he said.

The question is whether the exploitation of lithium reserves can bring benefits to the inhabitants of northwestern Argentina, a particularly impoverished area that has been increasingly in decline in recent years.

According to a paper by Aramayo, the province of Jujuy accounted for just 1.3 percent of Argentina’s GDP in 1980, and for only 0.6 percent this decade.

Historian Bruno Fornillo, who has researched what he calls “the geopolitics of lithium,” wrote that “the profits of the lithium energy industry – as in the case of the processing of all raw materials since the very start of capitalism – rise as you go up the value chain”.

Fornillo sees lithium as a possible tool for a new model of development and urges that local activity not be restricted to the extraction of the metal, but that it move towards the manufacturing of batteries, which requires a strong production of scientific knowledge.

This would, of course, involve the difficult task of breaking with the export and extractivist model.

“The extraction of lithium has things in common with other extractivisms, which are disguised as industries, but they are not, because they produce nothing, they only extract,” naturalist Claudio Bertonatti, an adviser to the Félix de Azara environmental foundation, told IPS.

“These industries have such economic power that they tend to overpower institutions in poor regions. And until a while ago they were associated with neoliberal governments, but lately we have realised that these companies have such power that the extractivism does not change, regardless of who is in the government,” he added.

The process of extracting lithium in the salt flats begins with the pumping of brine and continues with a long process of evaporation. Thus, using chemical substances, lithium is separated from other salts.

It is a similar method, although on an industrial scale, to the one used for generations to produce salt by the indigenous populations of the area, who have lived for thousands of years in the region where the lithium reserves are concentrated.

The indigenous property of many of the territories is also a source of conflict and, in fact, 33 communities from the provinces of Salta and Jujuy filed a claim in 2010 with Argentina’s Supreme Court, to try to assert their right to to be consulted, but was rejected by the highest court for formal reasons.

Later, in 2015, the same communities presented a consultation protocol that respects the principles and ancestral values of their peoples, the Kolla and Atacama, called Kachi Yupi (“Footprints of Salt”, in their native language). The document was delivered to the authorities to be used in any project that could affect them.

A lithium mine in the Salar de Cauchari-Olaroz, in the Andean highlands of the province of Jujuy, in northwestern Argentina. The government says it aims to attract 30 billion dollars in investment to develop mining. Credit: Chamber of Mining of the Province of Jujuy

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Nov 4 2017 (IPS)

Argentina does not have the mining tradition of other South American countries, but this could begin to change. The government wants to draw 30 billion dollars in foreign investment to tap the great mining potential along the eastern slope of the Andes mountain range, stretching from north to south.

However, added to the complexities involved in the task of seducing big capital, there is a major obstacle: the resistance of the environmental movement against large-scale mining, which in many parts of the country has mobilised entire communities and which has chalked up several major victories.

“We have a great opportunity to develop a resource that Argentina possesses and which could be even more important than what agriculture generates,” President Mauricio Macri said in June at the Casa Rosada, the seat of government, during an event also attended by governors and vice-governors of 12 of the country’s 23 provinces.

On that occasion, Argentina signed the Federal Mining Agreement, which establishes uniform guidelines for the entire country in terms of royalties to be charged by the provincial governments, and minimal regulation of environmental protection.

But, above all, the government was seeking to send out a signal of commitment to the activity and to dispel the doubts of investors, in a country where mining has been rejected by many communities.

Under Argentina’s constitution, natural resources belong to the provinces, which set the rules with regard to environmental protection.

Currently, there are seven provinces that have, due to social pressure, regulations that prohibit open-pit mining or the use of cyanide and other hazardous substances, which are usually used to separate valuable metals from rock.

The pioneer in the anti-mining movement was the southern province of Chubut, in Patagonia, which passed a law in 2003, after the population of the city of Esquel protested to keep out a Canadian mining company that sought to extract gold and silver.

The pressure forced the call for a plebiscite, in which more than 80 percent of voters rejected the mine. That milestone is considered the birth of the anti-mining movement in the country.

“The social movement against mining is one of the best organised and most powerful in Latin America,” said Enrique Viale, founder of the Argentine Association of Environmentalist Lawyers.

“That is the main concern of the national government and of companies, as evidenced by the fact that the Federal Mining Agreement stipulates that schools should teach the economic importance of mining. It seeks to indoctrinate the young, which we reject,” Viale told IPS.

President Mauricio Macri (front) and governors of different Argentine provinces in La Casa Rosada, seat of the government, when they signed the Federal Mining Pact, which sent out a signal for the enormous investments that they intend to attract to the sector. Credit: Presidency of the Nation

From the beginning of his term, Macri has been a staunch advocate of mining. In February 2016, when he had only been in office for two months, he eliminated taxes on mineral exports, as he also did for most agricultural commodities.

He also authorised all companies to transfer dividends abroad, which was restricted until 2015, as part of measures aimed at fomenting investment and the creation of employment.

However, the latest recent mining figures are not optimal.

Mining exports in 2016 totaled 3.619 billion dollars, six percent more than in 2015, while in the first eight months of this year exports reached 2.186 billion dollars, 0.8 percent less than in the same period of 2016.

This data is from a report by the economic consultancy firm Abeceb, which adds that there are 84,000 jobs in the sector, although there has been a 1.8 percent decline in jobs in the third quarter of this year.

Javier Cao, Abeceb project leader, clarified that, “without these measures favorable to mining, the latest numbers would surely have been worse”.

The expert told IPS that “we must bear in mind that several large mines were reaching the end of their useful life when the government took office. And that reality was offset. They were able, for example, to extend the life of the Alumbrera mine.”

This is the largest open pit mine in the country, which since 1997 has been producing copper, gold and molybdenum in the province of Catamarca, in the northwest of the country.

Cao added that it also conspires against investments in places where the government has not yet defined which are the mountainous areas with glaciers.

This generates uncertainty about the application of the 2010 Glacier Protection Law which prohibits mining on glaciers.

“No one is going to invest the huge sums that mining requires, with the risk of being told later that it is on a glacier and it is being closed down,” he said.

The law requires a “national inventory of glaciers”, which neither the previous government of Cristina Fernández (2007-2015) nor the current administration have carried out, which keeps delaying its enforcement.

That is one of the main arguments of those who question the government because they maintain that it prioritises mining over the preservation of the environment.

Pía Marchegiani, of the Environment and Natural Resources Foundation (FARN), said “the Federal Mining Agreement stipulates the control of activities carried out on glaciers, while the law, which has not yet been applied, prohibits mining there absolutely.”

“These kinds of issues show us that the official discourse favorable to environmentally sustainable mining does not reflect the reality,” she added in her conversation with IPS.

Marchegiani said that the main foreign investors in the mining industry in Argentina are Australia, Canada and the United States, while China still has very little weight, although its involvement is expected to grow, as it has elsewhere in Latin America.

That is precisely the door that the Argentine government wants to open.

In September, Undersecretary of Mining Development Mario Capello traveled to China with businessmen from the sector, and said that “mining has become a new pillar of the relationship between the two countries.”

In different cities in China, Capello presented the government’s program “Mining, a state policy”, with a digital presentation in which it claims that 750,000 of Argentina’s 2,800,000 square kilometers have a “high mining potential.”

This year, a Chinese company, Shandon Gold, already bought, for 960 million dollars, a 50 percent share of the Veladero gold and silver mine in the northwestern province of San Juan, which was operated by the Canadian company Barrick Gold, and was questioned by social and political sectors for repeated cyanide spills that affected water courses more than 4,000 meters above sea level.

Punta de Choros, a picturesque cove in northern Chile, has become a major tourist draw, and the number of restaurants, lodgings and whale-watching boat tours has climbed. Credit: Orlando Milesi/IPS

By Orlando Milesi
LA HIGUERA, Chile, Apr 11 2017 (IPS)

In Punta de Choros, a hidden cove on Chile’s Pacific coast, some 900 fishers do not yet dare celebrate the decision by regional authorities to deny the Dominga port mining project a permit due to environmental reasons.

The fishers, from the northern region of Coquimbo, are afraid that the government will unblock the project, in which the Chilean company Andes Iron planned to invest 2.5 billion dollars for the extraction of iron ore, promising 9,800 jobs in the building phase and 1,400 in the production phase.

The project would affect several nature reserves, and the local fishers also question the effects from the traffic of cargo ships and from a desalination plant.“More than a political problem, what we have here is a problem with the environmental assessment. There were a series of irregularities and that means that the impacts on one of the world’s 36 top biodiversity hotspots cannot be assessed.” -- Liesbeth Van der Meer

And as they said in interviews with IPS, they also doubt that the cabinet of ministers will uphold the decision by the regional environmental authorities, who rejected the plan for the Dominga mine, controlled by the Délano family.

Andes Iron will file an appeal this month to the cabinet – which will reach the final decision – asserting the positive aspects of the project, which is to extract 12 million tons a year of iron concentrate and other 150,000 tons of copper concentrate.

The 10,000-hectare project would involve an open-pit mine with a useful life of 26.5 years, a plant and a tailing disposal facility. It would also require a port to export the minerals to China, Japan and other markets.

“It is an area rich in benthic resources (bottom dwellers) and in algae and microorganisms. We want the mining project to be redesigned. Development is needed, especially in a poor area like this, but it has to be well done,” geographer and park ranger Paulina Correa, head of the Humboldt Penguin National Reserve, told IPS.

“We have low-impact tourism here. Many people make a living from this and protect it. We want development that protects the environment,” said Correa, lamenting that the mining project has divided the community between those who make a living from fishing and tourism, and those who live in the foothills of the Andes mountains.

Punta Choros has an official permanent population of 238, but that figure is multiplied by ten during tourist season, with the influx of workers employed by a dozen restaurants and lodgings that cater to the tourists drawn by the spectacular beaches, whale watching and traditional seafood cuisine.

The project was initially approved by the Coquimbo regional environmental authority, which stated that the mine complied with “the applicable environmental regulations,” and that the company “had corrected any errors, omissions and inaccuracies.”

Oscar Rebolledo, deputy director of the Coquimbo environmental authority, said “the measures proposed (by the company) take responsibility for the effects and circumstances” that may result from the mining project.

Signs against the Dominga iron mine are seen all over Punta de Choros, where fishers point to the growing catches, nature reserves crucial to the planet’s biodiversity, and the presence of large marine mammals, to argue against the extractive project in this village in northern Chile. Credit: Orlando Milesi/IPS

But Coquimbo Governor Claudio Ibáñez disagreed, and on Mar. 9 cast the vote that broke the tie between six regional secretariats, rejecting the project.

“What the company proposes in terms of environmental reparations or redress is inadequate to properly ensure the right to live in an environment free of pollution, the protection of the environment, the conservation of nature and the preservation of the environmental heritage,” said Ibañez, explaining his decisive vote.

He said he was aware that Dominga represents “an important possibility for economic and social development,” but added that he is just as aware that “we are putting at risk one of the world’s most important nature reserves and the habitat of dozens of species.”

Local fisherman and diver Josué Ramos, a member of the Los Choros fishing association, began making a living harvesting surf clams (Mesodesma donacium) in 1996. He told IPS that in 2000 the clam became locally extinct, and two years later a restocking programme started to be implemented.

“Just 10,000 clams, of the 100,000 that were projected, were restocked. But 14 years later, the effort had produced results. Today there is an 18-km beach with a 10-km productive area, and the clams are expanding,” he said.

“The year 2015 was the first year they started harvesting while simultaneously studying and monitoring the biomass. We extracted 670 tons and from a management area controlled by local people 95 tons were harvested. In 2016, the number increased to 832 tons in the main area and my trade association extracted 156 tons,” said Ramos.

“With the awareness that has been generated, we have obtained better results in the management areas, the seabeds to which the state gave us exclusive access to use and protect. Along 30 km of coastline, there are six management areas, which represent 70 per cent of the production of benthic resources in the region,” he said.

Ramos is opposed to Dominga because “they overexploit, export and then the prices rule. To obtain a ton of iron ore, which currently fetches 52 dollars, they leave 100 tons of tailings with chemical compounds. We harvest a ton of clams for 1.5 million dollars, and we only lift the sand, we don’t change it in any way.”

The local fisherman has “no expectation” that the cabinet will uphold the local environmental authority’s rejection of Dominga and believes that “the cursed progress” is going to prevail.

“Two ministers that vote have already resigned,” he added, in reference to the recent resignations of the ministers of transport, Andrés Gomez Lobos, and the environment, Pablo Badenier.

On Mar. 30, representatives of Andes Iron met with a dozen shepherds in the Casa Dominga, in the municipality of La Higuera. Although the meeting was closed, IPS saw the minutes.

“We are going to fight with everything we have. There is injustice here and we are not going to give in,” a representative of the company told the shepherds, who are in favour of the mine, and who took turns reporting on their interviews with local radio stations to discuss the positive aspects of the project.

At the end of the meeting, Omar Alfaro, with the La Higuera association of shepherds, told IPS that thanks to a framework agreement, “the Dominga project would improve the productive sectors, and when the mine closed down, we would be left with greater development in activities like agriculture, shepherding and fishing.”

Alfaro took part in a community meeting where the framework agreement was signed, which commits the company to pay “a minimum of 1.3 billion and a maximum of 2.6 billion pesos (between two and four million dollars) a year for projects, once the mine starts producing,” he said.

The agreement includes “the genetic improvement of livestock and the possibility of reforesting and recovering the native forest, deteriorated by prolonged droughts,” he said.

About the water the mine will use, Alfaro said that “a hydrogeologist explained the situation to us” stating that Dominga “is going to re-inject water into the same river basin.”

“We are hopeful that our institutions will be respected. I believe the project is important for the country, and the cabinet has a huge opportunity to revert and organise the technical instruments that have been used by the environmental institutions,” Iván Garrido, general manager of the Dominga project, told the online newspaper Pulso.

He urged the cabinet “to assess the report” by the Coquimbo environmental authority, which was favourable to the company.

Liesbeth Van der Meer, executive director of the non-governmental organisation Océana Chile, believes that the project will be rejected in the end.

“More than a political problem, what we have here is a problem with the environmental assessment. There were a series of irregularities and that means that the impacts on one of the world’s 36 top biodiversity hotspots cannot be assessed,” she told IPS.

If Dominga is approved, it will amount to “a crime against our natural heritage,” she said.

Van der Meer said he hoped “that not all development in Chile will be extractivist,” and called for respect for fishers and tourist operators in Punta de Choros, where the number of visitors soared from 900 in 1998 to 50,000 in 2016.

Mining is crucial to the Chilean economy and attracts more than one-third of all foreign investment, in a country that is the leading world producer of copper and other minerals, such as rhenium, lithium and iodine, as well as an important producer of several other minerals.

César Augusto Jaco, a member of an environmental community network, takes part in one of the demonstrations in support of the new law that bans metal mining in El Salvador, on March 29, in front of parliament. The measure, the first of its kind in the world, responds to a lengthy struggle by environmentalists and local communities. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Apr 3 2017 (IPS)

El Salvador, Central America’s smallest country, has become the first country in the world to pass a law banning metal mining in all its forms, setting a precedent for other nations in the world to follow, according to activists and local residents.

“This is historic; we are sending a signal to the world that countries can take a different path and say ‘no’ to the mining industry,” Edgardo Mira, an environmental activist with the National Council Against Metal Mining, an umbrella group of local organisations, told IPS.

With 69 votes out of 84, the members of the single-chamber Legislative Assembly passed on March 29 the landmark law, whose 11 articles amount to a blanket ban on mining, whether underground or surface.

Dozens of jubilant activists gathered early that day outside parliament to demand the approval by the plenary session of the ban agreed the day before by the legislature’s Environment and Climate Change Committee.““This is historic; we are sending a signal to the world that countries can take a different path and say ‘no’ to the mining industry.” -- Edgardo Mira

“I have visited the old mines which were active last century, where you can clearly see the impacts, such as acid drainage in the rivers, which would happen in the rest of the country,” retiree César Augusto Jaco, from the populous neighborhood of Cuscatancingo in the capital, told IPS.

Holding a sign with a yellow background and an image of a skull in black, the 76-year-old member of the Network of Community Environmentalists of El Salvador, said outside parliament: “Mining is disastrous, there’s no way it’s not going to damage our water sources.”

The risk of damaging the country’s groundwater reserves has been one of the main reasons driving the struggle of activists against the extractive industry, which uses millions of litres of water to obtain gold.

El Salvador is one of the most environmentally vulnerable countries, according to international agencies.

The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, the Latin American Water Tribunal, the International Water Association and the Global Water Partnership (GWP) concur that the country is heading toward a situation of water stress, researcher, José Simeón Cañas Central American University (UCA) researcher Andrés McKinley told IPS.

The law also prohibits the use of cyanide, mercury and other elements used in mining But it offers a two-year grace period to small-scale miners, so they can find another source of income.

Mira, from the National Council, estimated the number of artisanal miners at about 300, mostly in the San Sebastián mine in Santa Rosa de Lima, in the eastern department of La Unión.

Because the law is retroactive, it blocks all pending exploration permits.

The 2015 report “The Threat of Metal Mining in a Thirsty World,” written by McKinley and published by the UCA, documents the cases of countries where the activity has been restricted, but not banned outright.

Costa Rica, the report notes, passed a law in 2012 that banned open pit metal mining, while still allowing underground mining.

In 2002, the government of the province of Oriental Mindoro, in the Philippines, passed a 35-year moratorium on mining projects, and in 2011, the province of Zamboanga did the same with open-pit mining.

In 2014, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) vetoed the Pebble mine in the state of Alaska, to protect the largest habitat in the world of red or sockeye salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka).

Earlier, in 1989, the then president of Venezuela, Carlos Andrés Pérez, imposed a 50-year moratorium on all mining activity in the southern state of Amazonas. But that did not stop the expansion of illegal mining in that jungle region, while the current government reverted the measure de facto, allowing mining activity in the area.

“El Salvador is the first country in the world to evaluate the costs and benefits of the mining industry for the country and to exercise its right to say no,” McKinley told IPS.

The approval of the law was a product of many factors that combined to convince lawmakers to finally respond to the longstanding call from activists and local communities for a ban.

Among them, the pressure from environmentalist organisations that have struggled to that end for over a decade, and from the Catholic Church, which endorsed the popular demand.

On March 9, San Salvador’s archbishop, Luis Escobar Alas, led a march against metal mining to parliament, where they handed over a bill drawn up by the UCA, which formed the basis of the law that was finally adopted.

“The Catholic Church has enormous power in El Salvador, and its support for the struggle by local communities did not start this year, but in 2007, when it took a stance, at the Episcopal Conference, with its document Let’s Take Care of Everyone’s Home,” said McKinley.

The law is the culmination of years of struggle by environmental organisations and community leaders against, above all, the El Dorado mine in the central department of Cabañas, operated by the Pacific Rim company, now OceanaGold since it was acquired in 2013 by the Australian-Canadian corporation.

The company sued El Salvador for 250 million dollars in the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), after the rightwing Salvadoran government of the time cancelled its exploration permit in 2008.

The two successive governments of the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front have maintained this de facto moratorium since 2009.

In October 2016, ICSID ruled in favour of El Salvador, and ordered the company to pay eight million dollars in legal expenses, which it has failed to do.

And in a new setback, the body ruled on March 28 that the corporation must also pay interest on the debt, at a monthly rate between two and five per cent, on back payments dating to October.

These rulings also contributed to generating a climate conducive to approval of the ban.

“We are celebrating the triumph of our struggle, and our celebration continues out there in the communities where the people have been fighting,” Rina Navarrete, the coordinator of the Friends of San Isidro Cabañas Association, told IPS.i

She added that the accomplishment was a vindication of the work by “the fallen martyrs in this struggle against the mining corporation” – a reference to Ramiro Rivera, Marcelo Rivera (not related) and Dora Alicia Sorto, environmentalists killed by hitmen between June and December 2009, in the town of Cabañas.

Navarrete, a single mother of two who lives in the municipality of Llano de la Hacienda, in Cabañas, has taken up the work of the late Marcelo Rivera.

The activists were shot presumably because of their opposition to the activities of Pacific Rim in that area, although this has not been confirmed by the legal authorities.

Voter at Cinquera Consultation, Feb 26. 2017. Credit: Aruna Dutt

By Aruna Dutt
Cabañas, El Salvador, Mar 1 2017 (IPS)

The citizens of Cinquera municipality in Cabañas delivered a resounding vote against mining, on Sunday February 26th, when 98 percent of residents voted in favour of becoming El Salvador’s fifth “territory free of mining.”

“Mining companies have a wide field with major extension in other countries, and often they need to use the comparative law of other countries to be able to apply their practices here in El Salvador. But the truth is that El Salvador is a country so small that industrial mining is not viable,”Attorney for the Defense of Human Rights, William Iraheta told IPS.

El Salvador is the smallest country in Central America, but also has the highest population density, with 300 people per square kilometer. It is also the fourth most vulnerable country to climate change according to GermanWatch, with 95% of the population living in a high-risk zone.

Ana Marina Alvarenga, FMLN, speaking at Cinquera mining consultation. Credit: Aruna Dutt

Last year, the national government declared a water emergency. The Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources (MARN) concluded that only two percent of the country`s surface water is fit for human consumption and for the growth of aquatic life. Currently, those living in rural areas pay to have bottled water shipped by private companies. El Salvador’s environmental crisis and contamination of the population’s water, two-thirds of which comes from the Lempa River, has also been caused by the disparaging practices of metal mining in northeastern El Salvador.

The case of the Canadian mining company, Pacific Rim, and San Sebastian River pollution are the most visible examples of this destructive legacy.

Acid Drainage from Abandoned mine in San Sebastian River, Credit: Aruna Dutt

Between 1998 and 2003, 29 exploration licences were granted to mining companies, the most prominent being the Canadian company, Pacific Rim – now OceanaGold. When the government of El Salvador refused to provide mining permits to Pacific Rim’s proposed El Dorado mine because it failed to meet the government’s environmental requirements, the company sued the Salvadoran Government in 2009 for $77 million through a World Bank trade tribunal, the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes. Such demands are based on provisions of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) and the Salvadoran Investment Law. The Salvadoran Government won the lawsuit last October after spending millions on defense, but Pacific Rim/Oceana Gold has yet to pay up.

Even though the State of El Salvador recently won the case against the Canadian/Australian mining company, Oceana Gold, the struggle of the Salvadoran people for the defense of their environment continues.

“Currently it is the executive government, the president, who has been refusing mining projects, but there is no guarantee that these projects will be stopped in the future without a law,” said Ana Marina Alvarenga, FMLN (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front) congresswoman for the department of Cabañas at the Cinquera consultation.

“The position of our FMLN party supports the creation and passing of a law at the national level that definitely prohibits mining in our country. It is part of the legislative agenda or of the legislative platform for the FMLN 2015 to 2018 period to approve this law of prohibition of the metallic mining.”

International Observers at Cinquera Consultation, Feb 26th, 2017. Credit: Aruna Dutt.

As a way to pressure the Salvadoran government to implement a law definitively banning mining in El Salvador, social movements together with organised communities have been organizing to bring community consultations.

“Cabañas is located in the upper basin of the Lempa River, and in this sense any mining project that is in Cabañas, unfortunately will bring negative consequences for all departments through which the river Lempa runs, which is the majority,” said Alvarenga.

Since 2005, coinciding with the emergence of opposition to mining in Cabañas, the El Dorado Foundation has been operating in Cabanas as the public face of Pacific Rim/OceanaGold in El Salvador.

The foundation makes donations to local schools, sponsors health clinics, offers computer and English classes, and promotes business training for women, among other activities allowing the mining company to act as a benefactor to the surrounding communities.

“Mining Contaminates and Kills” Mural in Cinquera. Feb 26, 2017. Credit: Aruna Dutt

“The communities understand the impacts of mining but have become dependent on these services they provide,” says Vidalina Morales, President of the Association of Economic and Social Develop (ADES), who is also a member of the National Round-table against Metal Mining in El Salvador (La MESA) and has worked directly on mining issues as an organiser in Cabañas communities since 2006.

The foundation’s work is intended to enhance the company’s public reputation and cultivate support for the proposed El Dorado mine project.

Of particular concern is the threat of angry and potentially violent reprisals from people or groups receiving benefits, or who expect to receive benefits, should the mining project proceed. As determined by the regional court, Pacific Rim has been responsible for violence in Cabanas which has already claimed five lives, including three environmentalists: Marcelo Rivera, Ramiro Rivera, Dora Sorto and her unborn baby, and Juan Francisco Durán. The climate of fear resulting from these assassinations and other threats of violence is still palpable in the communities today.

“Although these companies may have financial and resource capital, the capital we have is community organising” said Pedro Cabezas, a representative of International Allies Against Mining, and the Association for the Development of El Salvdador (CRIPDES).

Attorney for the Defense of Human Rights, William Iraheta, overseeing the Cinquera consultation process. Feb 26th, 2017. Credit: Aruna Dutt

The election on Sunday was historic for the municipality of Cinquera, being  the first municipality of Cabañas, a largely agricultural territory bordering Honduras,  that initiated this process of popular consultation (consulta popular). Organised by the mayor’s office, along with the social organizations of the municipality of Cinquera, the direct vote resulted in 52% participation and 98% of votes against mining.

Community consultations (consultas) are a new phenomenon in El Salvador, but not a new phenomenon in Latin America. There have been consultas all through Mexico, Central America, South America, and there are different legal figures which communities utilise to hold consultas. A figure in El Salvador’s municipal code allows local municipalities to hold referendums to consult with communities on issues that truly affect them in their personal or family life.

Counting the votes, Cinquera, Feb 26. 2017. Credit: Aruna Dutt

Consultations are also a strategy to keep communities engaged and maintain the debate on both a national and local level. They involve an extensive organising process including petitions, campaigns, and work in every community in the municipality Said Cabezas.

It is also a process of educating the population at the grassroots level and keeping them informed about the issue of mining and involved in the process of using local democracy tools to defend their territory.

Vidalina Morales, ADES, at Cinquera Consulta, Feb 26, 2017. Credit: Aruna Dutt

“The subject of mining is seen to bring development to the communities. If the companies come, it’s true, they bring it as a profit: by units of work, development to the communities,” Attorney for the Defense of Human Rights, William Iraheta told IPS.

“But that is only the beginning – and at the end is a disaster. They deplete natural resources and at the end, only leave disaster for the communities. Since this directly affects communities, they must take into account, and have information on both sides of the argument to be able to decide what is viable for the community. ” Iraheta said.

Bernardo Belloso, President of CRIPDES which was part of the preparation of the popular consultation, said that it is not enough to have this municipal ordinance.

“We hope that this experience will also serve for other municipalities, ” said Belloso, “We want a more secure society for our future generations. It is important that the entire Salvadoran population take a position in order to defend the territory and defend the few natural resources that remain and our sovereignty, ” he said.

Correction: An earlier version of this article included a misspelling of William Iraheta’s name.

A delegate from the Alternative Mining Indaba dances during a protest march on Feb. 8, 2017. About 450 representatives of civil society mining-affected communities attended the conference in Cape Town. Credit: Mark Olalde/IPS

By Mark Olalde
CAPE TOWN, South Africa, Feb 18 2017 (IPS)

“Comrades, we have arrived. This cherry is eight years awaited. We have made it to this place,” Bishop Jo Seoka told the crowd, pausing to allow for the whistles and cheers.

Seoka, the chairman of a South African NGO called the Bench Marks Foundation, presided over the crowd of protesters that was busy verbally releasing years of frustration at the continent’s mining industry. The protest on Feb. 8 was part of the Alternative Mining Indaba (AMI) held in Cape Town.“We want transparency, we want accountability and, most importantly, we want participation of the people affected by mining." --Mandla Hadebe

The annual gathering brings together residents of mining-affected communities and civil society representatives to discuss common problems caused by the mining industry in Africa. On its third and final day, the AMI took to the streets to deliver its declaration of demands to industry and government representatives.

While police temporarily blocked the march from reaching the convention center hosting the Mining Indaba, the industry’s counterpart to the AMI, protesters were angry after years of having their side of the story largely ignored.

They marched up to the line of police and private security guarding the doors to the conference hall and demanded to speak with members of the Mining Indaba.

“As citizens and representations (sic) citizen-organisations we wish to express our willingness to work with African governments and other stakeholders in the quest to harness the continent’s vast extractive resources to underpin Africa’s socio-economic transformation and the [Africa Mining Vision] lays a foundation for this,” the declaration stated.

“I very much appreciate the willingness to engage in dialogue, and I think this is the first step towards establishing a common vision,” Tom Butler, CEO of the International Council on Mining & Metals, told the crowd before signing receipt of the declaration and handing it over for the managing director of the Mining Indaba to also sign.

Alternative Mining Indaba participants dance and sing struggle songs during their march on Feb. 8, 2017. Individual countries have begun holding their own alternative indabas, with South Africa’s first country-specific conference held this year in Johannesburg. Credit: Mark Olalde/IPS

While Butler came to the AMI to give a presentation on the mining industry’s behalf, few other members of government or the industry made an attempt to engage with the AMI. The Mining Indaba’s Twitter account even blocked some AMI delegates who took to social media to air their grievances.

The official Mining Indaba is a place for mining ministers, CEOs of mining houses and other industry representatives to network and strike deals. During the event, South Africa and Japan, for example, signed a bilateral agreement to boost collaboration along the mining value chain.

“This Indaba has affirmed South Africa’s status as a preferred investment destination,” Mosebenzi Zwane, the country’s minerals minister, said in a statement following the event. “As government, we are heartened by this and recommit to ensuring the necessary regulatory and policy certainty to attract even more investment into our country.”

In his opening address at the Mining Indaba, Zwane also announced that the draft of the new Mining Charter, a document guiding the country’s mining industry, would be published in March.

The AMI, however, was born as a community-level response to the fact that such decisions are usually made without consulting those most impacted by mining.

“They are going to find this huddled mass of people,” Mandla Hadebe, one of the event organizers, said of the protest’s goals in the first year. Only 40 delegates were present.

An Alternative Mining Indaba delegate from Swaziland sings protest songs. There was a feeling of triumph among the delegates after achieving even a degree of acknowledgement from industry representatives. Credit: Mark Olalde/IPS

In its eighth year, the AMI has grown to about 450 participants representing 43 countries. Delegates came from across Africa – from Egypt to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Malawi – as well as the rest of the world – from Cambodia to Bolivia and Australia – to share their stories.

“It just shows that our struggles are common and that we’ve decided to unite for a common purpose,” Hadebe said of the growth. “We want transparency, we want accountability and, most importantly, we want participation of the people affected by mining.”

A number of panels dedicated to community voices gave activists a platform to share their stories and methods of resistance. Translators in the various conference rooms translated among English, French and Portuguese, a necessity as well as a tacit nod to the ever-present effects of the same colonialism that brought mining.

“What we heard first were promises,” a woman from Peru recounted. “Thirty years passed, and now I call the second part of this process ‘the lies.’”

“We are trying to build a critical mass that is angry enough to oppose irresponsible mining,” a delegate from Kenya explained.

Some panels addressed specific issues facing Africa’s extractive industry. One discussion explained the need to move away from indirect taxes toward direct ones focused on mining houses. The presenter, a member of Tax Justice Network-Africa, said that an increase in government audits had led to a surge in tax revenue since 2009, a rare success story.

Another panel dealt with the realities of impending job loss due to widespread mechanization, while others took on the need for governments to strike better deals with international corporations.

Side events provided forums for more nuanced learning on topics such as the corruption involved with mining on communal land. At the showing of a documentary following South African land rights activist Mbhekiseni Mavuso, delegates from other countries such as Sierra Leone compared and contrasted their own forced relocations.

Mavuso said, “We are regarded as people who do not count. We have now become what we call ‘victims of development,’ and so that is also making us to become victims of democracy. We are fighting, so let us all stand up and fight.”

Occasionally, delegates took to the microphone to lament continued talk with minimal action. Much of the AMI focused on the Africa Mining Vision, a document produced by the African Union. While its goal is to make mining beneficial for all Africans, the document is a high-level policy discussion lacking a direct connection to affected communities.

The three-day conference has outgrown its ability to delve deeply into every issue impacting the represented countries, so delegates have taken the idea to their home nations. In the past year, Madagascar, Angola, Swaziland and others held their first country-specific alternative indabas.

Only a week before the AMI, South Africa hosted its first such conference in Johannesburg.

Despite many delegates expressing feelings of helplessness or anger, the march to the Mining Indaba provided a temporary sense of victory.

After finally obtaining some level of acknowledgment from industry representatives, the AMI participants danced and took selfies outside the Mining Indaba, far from the townships and rural villages adjacent to mines.

As the delegates boarded busses to depart the event, the vehicles shook from stomping and singing, and some protesters leaned out the windows to shout their last parting sentiments on behalf of mining-affected communities around the country and the continent.

*Mark Olalde’s mining reporting is financially supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the Fund for Environmental Journalism and the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

A stream meanders through a wetland in Wakkerstroom, Mpumalanga. The region is a Strategic Water Source Area, the segments of South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland that make up 8 percent of land area but account for 50 percent of water supply. Credit: Mark Olalde/IPS

By Mark Olalde
JOHANNESBURG, Oct 4 2016 (IPS)

The dam supplying Johannesburg’s water sits less than 30 percent full. Water restrictions have been in place since November and taxes on high water use since August. Food prices across South Africa have risen about 10 percent from last year, in large part due to water shortages.

“If you’re going to have a large coal mine in [a protected area], what’s the point really?” -- Melissa Fourie
In the midst of one of the country’s worst droughts in recorded history, the government continues to permit new coal mines and coal-fired power plants. One mine in particular is gaining increased scrutiny, as it has been given nearly all the permits necessary to mine in a high yield water area called the Mabola Protected Environment in the Mpumalanga province.

Indian mining company Atha-Africa Ventures (Pty) Ltd’s proposed Yzermyn Underground Coal Mine would sit 160 miles southwest of Johannesburg in the catchments of three major rivers: the Vaal, the Tugela and the Pongola. The surrounding area also falls within a Strategic Water Source Area, the eight percent of land in South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland that accounts for 50 percent of water supply.

The proposed mine site is in the midst of numerous other protected and high importance demarcations such as the endangered Wakkerstroom Montane Grassland and the South Eastern Escarpment National Spatial Biodiversity Assessment Priority Area. The Mpumalanga Biodiversity Sector Plan labels the habitat of the proposed site as “Irreplaceable and Optimal Critical Biodiversity Areas.”

A southern masked weaver sits on a branch in the Wakkerstroom Wetland Reserve and Crane Sanctuary, a local tourist destination. The area is known for several endemic crane species, and the Mpumalanga Biodiversity Sector Plan identifies it as “Irreplaceable and Optimal Critical Biodiversity Areas.” Credit: Mark Olalde/IPS

Because the mine would tunnel underneath Mabola, the Protected Areas Act prohibits mining unless a company obtains written permission from the directors of both the Department of Mineral Resources, DMR, and Department of Environmental Affairs, DEA.

The DMR signed off on the project when it granted a mining right in September 2014, just eight months after Mabola was declared protected. However, at a September hearing of the South African Human Rights Commission, a representative of the DMR falsely asserted under oath that the department would not allow mining in the area. The DEA has given no indication of Minister Edna Molewa’s plans regarding the mine.

Neither the DMR nor the DEA responded to requests for comment by the time of publication.

Melissa Fourie is the director of the Centre for Environmental Rights, which is spearheading litigation to slow the mine’s progress through the permitting procedure. She said the whole process has been “slight of hand” and “a lot of smoke and mirrors.”

“If you’re going to have a large coal mine in [a protected area], what’s the point really?” Fourie told IPS. “It affects not just that area, but it affects the whole country’s water resources and a whole lot of downstream users.”

The Vaal River System ultimately provides water for most of the country’s coal-fired electricity generation, as well as the country’s most populous province of Gauteng, and Fourie fears pollution from the mine would impact the system.

The underground Yzermyn mine would cover about 2,500 hectares of Atha-Africa’s 8,360 hectare mining right. Surface infrastructure would be kept to a minimum, although plans indicate a pollution control dam is to be built on a wetland.

Atha-Africa’s senior vice president Praveer Tripathi said, “The evidence that mining in that area is going to disturb the functionality of the wetland as well as any apprehensions about acid mine drainage were very, very scant.” According to Tripathi and the environmental authorisation, mitigation will include recharging wetlands, onsite water treatment and sealing of the shafts post-closure.

Tripathi argued that a nearby abandoned mine is dry, which would suggest Yzermyn might not flood and cause acid mine drainage. However, it took several iterations of consultants’ reports to reach the conclusion that the mine would have minimal environmental impacts. “There was concerns raised by our own specialists about some of the negative effects of some activities,” Tripathi said.

Farmer and chairman of the Mabola Protected Environment Oubaas Malan points out his farm from the proposed mine site. Because the mine would tunnel under a legally protected environment, it requires the written approval of the ministers of both the Department of Mineral Resources and the Department of Environmental Affairs. Credit: Mark Olalde/IPS

Angus Burns, senior manager for the Land and Biodiversity Stewardship Programme at WWF-SA, was active in the movement to demarcate protected areas. “The precedent that can be set by the allowance of this kind of activity within a protected environment opens up, I believe, a floodgate of opportunities for any mining company to challenge protected environments,” he said.

The water use license granted to Atha-Africa allows the company to use 22 Olympic size swimming pools-worth of water annually, dewater the underground area it would mine and pump a limited amount of treated effluent into wetlands.

In a statement, Tsunduka Khosa, the director of water use licensing at the Department of Water and Sanitation said: “The water use licence granted contains a set of conditions aimed at mitigating the possible impacts…South Africa is water scarce country. Therefore all activities that have a potential to impact water resources are considered serious to the Department and all available water resources are sensitive.”

Mining opponents also claim political ties helped push this mine through a stringent permitting process. One of Atha-Africa’s Black Economic Empowerment partners called Bashubile Trust has several trustees with connections to President Jacob Zuma. Sizwe Zuma, one of the trustees, is alleged to be the president’s relative – although Atha-Africa denies this – and in court documents Sizwe Zuma listed his residential address as the presidential estate in Pretoria.

Bashubile did not respond to requests for comment. Mpumalanga’s Department of Agriculture, Rural Development, Land and Environmental Affairs, which acknowledged all the protected areas yet still granted the environmental authorization, also did not respond.

Regardless of permits, much of the population in nearby Wakkerstroom, Mpumalanga, is afraid that mining would severely impact the current economy, which is reliant on livestock farming and ecotourism.

Johan Uys works on his family’s farm near Wakkerstroom and said his children will be the sixth generation to farm there. “Most of the people that are from Wakkerstroom are against mining, but there are the people that don’t have jobs that are for the mining because there are these promises that are made,” he said, citing the racial disparity between wealthy white landowners and poor black communities in town.

Wakkerstroom residents from the black community said they would only want mining if Atha-Africa pledged environmental protection and sustainable job growth. The company estimates that 500 direct jobs will be created and 2,000 indirect, although the mine is only expected to operate for 15 years.

“We know from very bitter experience that this hardly ever transpires,” Fourie said of the job creation estimates. “So often those jobs are not local jobs.”

Mark Olalde’s mining investigations are financially supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism, the Fund for Environmental Journalism and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Additional support was provided by #MineAlert and Code for Africa.

Nagomba E., 75, standing where her house used to be in Mwabulambo, Karonga district. She and her family were told to relocate in 2008 because the land was needed for coal mining. Credit: Lauren Clifford-Holmes for Human Rights Watch

By Birgit Schwarz
LILONGWE, Sep 27 2016 (IPS)

Nagomba E. is no longer young; her hip is giving her trouble and her back is stooped from years of bending over her corn and rice fields. Yet every morning, at the crack of dawn, the wiry 74-year-old sets out on a strenuous half-hour walk to fetch water from a nearby river so that her ailing husband can take a bath. Despite her limp, Nagomba moves fast and with the sure-footedness of a mountain goat.

It would be easier for her to fetch her water from a borehole that is closer to her house. But the water is often “bad” she says, “you cannot even use it for bathing.” Besides, she adds, “if you oversleep, you are there till noon,” waiting for a turn at the pump.

Before coal was discovered in Mwabulambo, a remote rural community of Karonga District in northern Malawi, water was never something Nagomba and her neighbours would have to worry about or even line up for.

“I used to have two taps right at my house,” Nagomba says, “with running water in the kitchen and bathroom.” But then heavy trucks moved in — which turned out to belong to a mining company. The company, with government’s approval, claimed her land, forced her to relocate to the edge of the coal field further south, and tore down her house. With it went the taps and water pipes.

That was almost nine years ago. Since then, the coal mine, which Nagomba and her neighbours hoped would bring progress and development, has mainly caused regression, hazards, and hardship.

Over the past decade, Malawi, one of the world’s poorest countries, has promoted private investment in mining and resource extraction as a way to grow and diversify its largely agriculture-based economy. Karonga, where Nagomba lives, is the country’s test case for industrial mining.

Malawi’s first uranium mine and two of the country’s biggest coal mines are located here, on the western shores of Lake Malawi. The government said the mines would provide jobs and improve people’s livelihoods. Schools were promised, and clinics as well as boreholes to restore access to drinking water. Hardly any of these promises ever materialized.

Weak enforcement of existing laws and policies combined with lack of transparency and community involvement in decision making have left local communities unprotected and in the dark about their rights and about the risks mining activities might pose to their daily lives, Human Rights Watch says in a new report, “They Destroyed Everything.” Mining companies meanwhile are allowed to monitor themselves and are almost never held to account if they cause devastation.

When strangers knocked on her door during the 2008 rainy season and told her that she would have to move to make room for a coal mine, Nagomba was taken by surprise.

Nagomba, who supported three grandchildren and her sick husband with the income from farming a small but fertile plot of land, eventually accepted the inevitable, thinking that she would get “a lot of money.” She never asked how much, however. As it turned out, the compensation was not even enough to rebuild her house. The family had to sell two cows to put a roof over their heads again. She received no money for the land itself. It was “customary land” that her family had farmed for generations, but for which they held no individual title.

Mining machinery left behind at Eland coal mine at Mwabulambo after closure in 2015. Locals said that before the mine was closed, they were not informed about the closure or how the company intended to mitigate risks stemming from the abandoned mining site. Credit: Lauren Clifford-Holmes for Human Rights Watch

Over the years, Nagomba’s story repeated itself again and again in the mining areas of Karonga. In Mwabulambo alone, more than 30 households were relocated from their customary land between 2008 and 2015, when the mining company suspended operations. At times, the bulldozers moved in so fast that people had neither time to rebury their loved ones interred on the community’s land, nor to finish reconstructing their homes. One family spent weeks sleeping under a tree before they could move into their rebuilt house.

The mine is owned and operated by Eland Coal Mining Company, a subsidiary of the Isle of Man-based Heavy Mineral Limited, which in turn is owned by Independent Oil & Resources PLC – a company based in Cyprus. Although it has not been operational for more than a year, it continues to affect the area, its water resources, and Nagomba’s source of income, her crops.

“We used to grow corn, cassava and rice,” she recalls. “Now we are complaining of hunger.” The fields she was given lie on the edge of the mine. Every time it rains, blackish, potentially acidic, mine water runs into her fields, withering her crop and diminishing her yield. “We cannot afford to buy food. We need to farm,” she says. “But they have destroyed the land where we were producing fruit, and left us behind with nothing.”

Since the mine’s closure, the community has tried to get the company to clean up, restore their broken pipes, ensure that mine water no longer seeps into their borehole and onto their fields, and close the deep pits that were left behind. In 2015, the villagers went to the District Commissioner’s Office to air their grievances. Getting no help there, they marched to the gates of the company. “We told them ‘you are really wronging us,’” Nagomba recalls. “We don’t have water. We don’t have food. But we are still waiting for an answer.”

To this day, residents fear that the borehole and river water is putting their health at risk. Cows and even children have fallen into ill-secured, water-filled pits the company left behind. And villagers say the pits themselves have become breeding grounds for malaria-carrying mosquitos.

“If they had built a health center, they could at least have saved some lives from malaria,” says Rojaina, another community member who was forced to relocate. As the promised clinic was never built and the nearest hospital is miles away in town, “people die on the way,” she says.

Few are aware of the dangers the water in the pits itself poses. The government had the water tested last year. These tests confirmed that the water is acidic, the deputy director for water quality at the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Water told Human Rights Watch, which means that it is neither safe for consumption nor bathing. But the results have never been made public. Children regularly swim in the pits behind Nagomba’s house. And no signs warn of the dangers these pools pose to human health.

Now that Nagomba no longer has piped water, she depends on the river a lot, particularly during dry season, when borehole and well run dry, walking there up to four times a day to fetch water for bathing, drinking and cooking. She worries about the safety of the river water, too, but at least she can treat it with chemicals the government provided after a cholera outbreak at the beginning of the year.

The river Nagomba depends on flows into Lake Malawi, a fragile ecosystem and a key source of livelihood for over 1.5 million people. More than 10 extraction projects are located on the lake’s shores and tributaries, which are protected UNESCO World Heritage sites. Not all are active yet. But the risks these mining activities pose to the lake’s ecosystem and to the bordering communities’ health and livelihoods are enormous without proper government oversight.

So far, Malawi’s law has failed to protect the needs and rights of mining communities like Nagomba’s and her neighbours’ from the adverse effect mining has had on their lives. It has also failed to protect their environment and water resources. A new mining bill being drafted could help change this, strengthening governmental control over mining projects and the communities’ right to know.

Malawi’s government has taken some steps in the right direction, and acknowledged the need to enforce a rehabilitation plan the owners of the defunct Mwabulambo mine had promised to carry out. So far the company has done nothing.

“I never had problems,” says Nagomba, recalling a time where there was enough to eat and safe water to drink. “The mining company brought me problems.” After nine years of suffering and hunger without protection from the government or the mining company, she has little hope that things will change for the better in her lifetime. “Time is already up,” she says in a voice that sounds as if she is reciting poetry. “We are just waiting to go to our graves now.”

Excerpt:

Members of the 16 rural families who refuse to abandon their homes in the village of Taquiruta until the company running the Las Bambas mine compensates them fairly for the loss of their animals, pens and houses. In the background can be seen the biggest mine in Peru. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

By Aramis Castro and Milagros Salazar
LIMA/CHALLHUAHUACHO , Sep 17 2016 (IPS)

Of the 150 socioeconomic conflicts related to the extractive industries that Peru’s new government inherited, one of the highest-profile is the protest by the people living near the biggest mining project in the history of the country: Las Bambas.

The enormous open-pit copper mine in the district of Challhuahuacho, in the southern department of Apurímac, is operated by the Chinese-Australian company MMG Limited, controlled by China Minmetals Corporation, which invested more than 10 billion dollars in its first project in Latin America.

Peru, where mining is the backbone of the economy, is the third-largest copper producer in the world and the fifth-largest gold producer.

Las Bambas, which started operating in January, is projected to have an initial annual production of 400,000 tons of copper concentrate.

The conflict reached its peak in September 2015 when three people were killed and 29 wounded in a clash between local residents and the police. The former government of Ollanta Humala (2011-2016) assembled a working group to address local demands.

The working group’s first meeting since conservative President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski took office on Jul. 28 was held on Aug. 22.

“We don’t want conflicts. But if we give you the mine, we have to set conditions,” Daniel Olivera, a local farmer from the community of Ccayao, told IPS with regard to the neglected demands of people living around the mine, which has reserves of 7.2 million metric tons of copper, in addition to molybdenum and other minerals.

The working group was set up in February, to address four issues: human rights, environment, sustainable development with public investment, and corporate social responsibility.

The only concrete result achieved so far, according to the representatives of the Quechua communities surrounding the mine, was compensation for the families of the three people killed in the violent clash.

The last session took place Sep. 7-8, but it mainly dealt with technical aspects. The head of the Front for the Defence of the Interests of the Province of Cotatambas, Rodolfo Abarca, told IPS that he expects the next meetings, scheduled for October, to deal with “substantive issues”.

The mine’s three open pits and the processing facilities are located 4,000 metres above sea level in the Andes mountains, between the Cotabambas and Grau provinces in the Apurímac region.

The Front demands that an independent study be carried out in order to shed light on the origins of the conflict: the changes approved by the Ministry of Mines and Energy to the environmental impact assessment of the project, without consulting the local population, in spite of the potential impact on the water sources, soil and air.

The most controversial move was made in 2013 when the authorities allowed the transfer of the plant that separates molybdenum from copper, from Tintaya in the neighboring region of Cuzco, to Fuerabamba, in Cotatambas.

Two girls with their mother on a street of Nueva Fuerabamba, the town where the relocated Quechua villagers were transferred because of the open-pit copper mine in Las Bambas, removed from their traditional way of life, in the department of Apurímac, in the Andean highlands of southern Peru. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

The transfer meant new studies were necessary to measure the potential environmental impacts at the new site. But this step was disregarded in the supporting technical report, according to the environmental engineers who went through the more than 1,500 pages of project records with the team from the investigative journalism site Convoca.

While the Ministry of Mines and Energy and the mining company Las Bambas saw these changes as minor and involving insignificant impacts, the experts said they were significant modifications that required a closer analysis.

The supporting technical report is part of a simplification of requirements carried out by Humala’s government in 2013 through decree 054-2013-PCM, aimed at accelerating private investment in the country.

Among the simplifications was a new rule that the local population no longer has to be consulted before allowing changes in environmental impact studies, on the assumption that these changes only affect secondary components of the project or expansions for technological improvements.

Convoca’s journalists told IPS that the environmental engineers informed them that in the case of Las Bambas, the technical supporting report was used to rapidly justify changes, without having to conduct specific studies to prevent potential environmental impacts, and to avoid consulting local communities.

The technical supporting report also made it possible for the minerals to be transported by truck, instead of only through pipelines as in the past. As a result, the trucks have been throwing up clouds of dust since January, a problem that has further fuelled the local protests.

The company told Convoca via email that they use “sealed containers” and that they spray the roads with water before the trucks drive by.

With the removal of the requirement for pipelines went the hopes of people in the 20 farming communities and four small towns in four different districts, who expected to lease or sell the lands crossed by the pipelines that were projected in the initial environmental impact assessment.

The decision “hit us like a bucket of cold water… It’s very sad,” added Olivera, who is from a community where the pipelines were supposed to cross.

The environmental engineers argued that what should have been done was a study of the environmental impact caused by the transport of minerals by truck instead of through a pipeline.

They also said a health impact assessment was needed after the relocation of the filtration plant, “since besides copper, molybdenum is also processed and produced, which is harmful to human health,” causing liver failure and different types of arthritis.

The Ministry of Mines and Energy said by email that the relocation of “the molybdenum plant, as well as the filtration area and the concentrate storage facility,” only required a technical supporting report because the management plan approved for the plant was not modified.

Moreover, they said the area of influence of the project was reduced, and argued that a plan approved to recirculate the mining process water was an “improvement.”

The company said that before submitting their report, it “identified and evaluated the impacts that would be generated in each case,” and concluded that “they would not be significant.”

In his inaugural address, President Kuczynski said he would demand compliance with all environmental regulations and would respect the views of every citizen regarding a project’s environmental impact.

But the former vice minister of environmental management, José de Echave, pointed out to IPS that “there is no mechanism for public participation,” even when local residents are not opposed to a project.

According to the ombudsperson’s office there are 221 unresolved social conflicts in Peru, 150 (71 percent) of which are centered on territories where extractive projects are being carried out and have an environmental component.

De Echave said the government should create strategies to monitor social conflicts and deal with them through dialogue with government agencies.

Access to land is another issue behind the social conflict in Las Bambas.

There are 16 families in the village of Taquiruta, on the edge of the town of Fuerabamba, who live very close to the centre of operations of Las Bambas and refuse to leave their homes and parcels of land until the company provides them with fair compensation. The minerals are under the ground where their houses sit.

They are the only ones that until now have not left. Over the last two years, more than 400 families have been relocated to a new settlement, half an hour away from the community, named Nueva Fuerabamba (new Fuerabamba).

De Echave said the government should implement a land-use planning law to anticipate potential conflicts over access to natural resources.

With reporting by Alicia Tovar (Lima).

Anna Sapur of the Hako Women's Collective leads a human rights training program for youths in Hako Constituency, North Bougainville. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

By Catherine Wilson
HAKO, Buka Island, Autonomous Region of Bougainville, Papua New Guinea , Jun 13 2016 (IPS)

Finding a sense of identity and purpose, as well as employment are some of the challenges facing youths in post-conflict Bougainville, an autonomous region in eastern Papua New Guinea in the southwest Pacific Islands.

They have been labelled the ‘lost generation’ due to their risk of being marginalised after missing out on education during the Bougainville civil war (1989-1998), known locally as the ‘Crisis’.

But in Hako constituency, where an estimated 30,000 people live in villages along the north coast of Buka Island, North Bougainville, a local women’s community services organisation refuses to see the younger generation as anything other than a source of optimism and hope.

“They are our future leaders and our future generation, so we really value the youths,” Dorcas Gano, president of the Hako Women’s Collective (HWC) told IPS.“There were no schools, no teachers and no services here and we had no food to eat. I saw people killed with my own eyes and we didn’t sleep at night, we were frightened." -- Gregory Tagu, who was in fifth grade when the war broke out.

Youth comprise about 60 percent of Bougainville’s estimated population of 300,000, which has doubled since the 1990s. The women’s collective firmly believes that peace and prosperity in years to come depends on empowering young men and women in these rainforest-covered islands to cope with the challenges of today with a sense of direction.

One challenge, according to Gregory Tagu, a youth from Kohea village, is the psychological transition to a world without war.

“Nowadays, youths struggle to improve their lives and find a job because they are traumatised. During the Crisis, young people grew up with arms and knives and even today they go to school, church and walk around the village with knives,” Tagu explained.

Tens of thousands of children were affected by the decade-long conflict, which erupted after demands for compensation for environmental damage and inequity by landowners living in the vicinity of the Panguna copper mine in the mountains of central Bougainville were unmet. The mine, majority-owned by Rio Tinto, a British-Australian multinational, opened in 1969 and was operated by its Australian subsidiary, Bougainville Copper Ltd, until it was shut down in 1989 by revolutionary forces.

The conflict raged on for another eight years after the Papua New Guinea Government blockaded Bougainville in 1990 and the national armed forces and rebel groups battled for control of the region.

Many children were denied an education when schools were burnt down and teachers fled. They suffered when health services were decimated, some became child soldiers and many witnessed severe human rights abuses.

Tagu was in fifth grade when the war broke out. “There were no schools, no teachers and no services here and we had no food to eat. I saw people killed with my own eyes and we didn’t sleep at night, we were frightened,” he recalled.

Trauma is believed to contribute to what women identify as a youth sub-culture today involving alcohol, substance abuse and petty crime, which is inhibiting some to participate in positive development.

They believe that one of the building blocks to integrating youths back into a peaceful society is making them aware of their human rights.

In a village meeting house about 20-30 young men and women, aged from early teens to late thirties, gather in a circle as local singer Tasha Kabano performs a song about violence against women. Then Anna Sapur, an experienced village court magistrate, takes the floor to speak about what constitutes human rights abuses and the entitlement of men, women and children to lives free of injustice and physical violations. Domestic violence, child abuse and neglect were key topics in the vigorous debate which followed.

But social integration for this age group also depends on economic participation. Despite 15 years of peace and better access to schools, completing education is still a challenge for many. An estimated 90 percent of students leave before the end of Grade 10 with reasons including exam failure and inability to meet costs.

“There are plenty of young people who cannot read and write, so we really need to train them in adult literacy,” Elizabeth Ngosi, an HWC member from Tuhus village declared, adding that currently they don’t have access to this training.

Similar to other small Pacific Island economies, only a few people secure formal sector jobs in Bougainville while the vast majority survive in the informal economy.

At the regional level, Justin Borgia, Secretary for the Department of Community Development, said that the Autonomous Bougainville Government is keen to see a long-term approach to integrating youths through formal education and informal life skills training. District Youth Councils with government assistance have identified development priorities including economic opportunities, improving local governance and rule of law.

In Hako, women are particularly concerned for the 70 percent of early school leavers who are unemployed and in 2007 the collective conducted their first skills training program. More than 400 youths were instructed in 30 different trade and technical skills, creative visual and music art, accountancy, leadership, health, sport, law and justice and public speaking.

Two-thirds of those who participated were successful in finding employment, Gano claims.

“Some of them have work and some have started their own small businesses….Some are carpenters now and have their own small contracts building houses back in the villages,” she said.

Tuition in public speaking was of particular value to Gregory Tagu.

“I have no CV or reference, but with my public speaking skills I was able to tell people about my experience and this helped me to get work,” Tagu said. Now he works as a truck driver for a commercial business and a technical officer for the Hako Media Unit, a village-based media resource set up after an Australian non-government organisation, Pacific Black Box, provided digital media training to local youths.

Equipping young people with skills and confidence is helping to shape a new future here and further afield. HWC’s president is particularly proud that some from the village have gone on to take up youth leadership positions in other parts of Bougainville, including the current President of the Bougainville Youth Federation.

"Women Leaders at COP 21 in Paris Raise the Banner for Gender Awareness in Any Climate Deal." Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
PARIS, France , Dec 8 2015 (IPS)

53-year old Aleta Baun of Indonesia’s West Timor province is a proud climate warrior. From 1995 to 2005 she successfully led a citizens’ movement to shut down 4 large marble mining companies that polluted and damaged the ecosystem of a mountain her community considered sacred. After their closure in 2006, she became a conservationist and restored 15 hectares of degraded mountain land, reviving dozens of dried springs and resettling 6,000 people who were displaced by the mining.

On Monday, on the eve of the Gender Day at the ongoing UN Climate Change Summit (COP21) in Paris, Baun who is better known as or ‘Mama Aleta’ in West Timor, had a strong message for the negotiators: for a climate deal to be effective on the ground, it also had to be gender equal and recognize women’s climate leadership.

Running a landscape restoration project is costly. Baun has so far spent about 50,000 dollars pooled by community members and local NGOs. The project needs much more for completion. But this is a challenge as official funding has not come forth. This dismays Baun who feels that although women were setting great examples of climate leadership, it is not officially recognized by governments and international policy makers.

For example, she said, there was no official communication between the Indonesian delegation of negotiators at the COP and grassroots women climate activists like her. “We don’t know who the negotiators are and we don’t know what they are negotiating. We feel that we, the indigenous women, are alone in this fight against climate change,” she said.

Baun’s dismay and disappointment was shared by several other women leaders who expressed their thoughts on the draft climate policy at the COP. The draft, tabled at the end of the first week for formal negotiations, was “far from ideal,” said a woman leader because it had “too many brackets that made the text too complicated.”

“The purpose of the many sections is not clear. Also, some crucial components are missing. For example, gender equality is there, but indigenous people are not. One very important thing is inter-generational equity. For us, this is a core issue and it’s really not clear,” said Sabina Bok of Women in Europe for a Common Future.

Farah Kabir, head of ActionAid in Bangladesh agreed as her country has been hit by extreme weather events like flooding and sea disasters that have affected millions of women from poor communities. “The draft policy has lack of clarity on several of these points,” she said.

Presently, the key demands of most women leaders at the COP21 included commitment by all governments to keep global warming under 1.5 Celsius to prevent catastrophic climate change, including in all climate actions the recognition of human rights, gender equality, rights of indigenous peoples and intergenerational equity and provide new, additional and predictable gender-responsive public financing.

But, the negotiators seemed divided on the global warming target, which dismayed Kabir. “It is not clear whether the deal will stop global warming at 1.5 degree or at 2 degrees, the later will be catastrophic for women as that will mean more disasters and more suffering for women who are already the most vulnerable people.”

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) estimated that women comprise one of the most climate vulnerable populations. As the impact of climate change on women grows bigger, the vulnerability of women across the world is also growing and there is a sheer need for allowing women greater access to renewable technologies, said many. However, these technologies also had to be safe and gender responsive, so that they responded to both the daily and different needs and priorities of women. Alongside, investment is the need to train women in how to use these technologies.

Investments are also needed to facilitate women’s leadership in both mitigation and adaptation measures, said Neema Namadamu, a women leader from northern DRC. “In Congo, women are busy planting trees to help re-grow our rain forests. First, we need assured investments into initiatives like this that is a direct flight against climate change. The hair-splitting negotiations can continue after that,” said Namadamu, founder of Mama Shuja, a civil society organization that trained grassroots Congolese women in climate action and fighting gender violence using digital media tools.

However, to ensure women’s greater access to climate finance, renewable technologies and adaptation capacity, the climate draft needed to have a sharper gender focus, felt Mary Robinson, former Prime Minister of Ireland and one of the greatest women climate leaders.

“There will be a climate deal in Paris. It will not be a ‘great’ deal, but a fairly ambitious one. But its extremely important to have a climate agreement that is ambitious, fair and also gender-fair. We definitely need an agreement that will exhilarate more women’s leadership. If we had more women’s leadership, we would have been where we are now,” Robinson said.

(End)

In the city of Calama, the so-called mining capital of Chile in the northern region of Antofagasta, the marked social contrasts are reflected by the proximity of affluent neighbourhoods of modern homes next to shantytowns of tumbledown wooden huts. Credit: Marianela Jarroud/IPS

By Marianela Jarroud
CALAMA, Chile, Sep 11 2015 (IPS)

The inhabitants of the northern Chilean mining region of Antofagasta have the highest per capita income in the country. But some 4,000 local families continue to live in slums – a reflection of one of the most marked situations of inequality in this country.

“The contrasts in this region are enormous. The miners earn a lot of money, their wages are really high. It’s common to see enormous houses, and hovels just a few metres away,” said Jaime Meza, who lives in the city of Calama.

In the municipality of Calama, where the city is located, there are 37 mining operations. One of them is the Chuquicamata mine, the world’s biggest open-pit copper mine.

The region of Antofagasta has the highest GDP per capita the country, the highest level of economic growth, and the best conditions for achieving development, according to a study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Official figures indicate that this region of 625,000 people has an average per capita income of 37,205 dollars a year, nearly eight times the average per capita income of the southern region of Araucanía, which is just 4,500 dollars.

The national average in this country of 17.6 million people is 23,165 dollars.

However, 45,000 people are living in poverty in Antofagasta, including 4,000 in extreme poverty.

In the region, some 4,000 families, representing thousands of people, live in 42 slums.

The city of Calama, known as the “mining capital of Chile”, which calls itself the oasis of the Atacama desert, is located 2,250 metres above sea level, some 240 km from Antofagasta, the regional capital, and 1,380 km north of Santiago.

The city is home to 150,000 people, although the floating population of workers attracted by the mines drives the total up to over 200,000.

In the municipality of Calama, which covers an area of 15,600 sq km, are located four of the eight mines belonging to the state-run copper company, CODELCO, which has majority ownership of the industry and is the world’s biggest copper producer.

The city of Calama describes itself as an oasis hidden in the middle of the Atacama desert, the driest place in the world. It is also a strategic hub of mining in the region of Antofagasta in northern Chile, where copper mining is the main economic activity. Credit: Marianela Jarroud/IPS

A large part of the 57,000 immigrants living in the region, which borders Argentina and Bolivia and is not far from Peru, are in Calama, drawn by the mining industry.

The mix of nationalities can be seen on a day-to-day basis, such as in the waiting room at a public hospital.

“This is definitely a multicultural city,” Dr. Rodrigo Meza at the Doctor Carlos Cisternas de Calama hospital told IPS. “Of all the births at our hospital, 40 percent are to immigrant women.”

In a short tour of the run-down centre of Calama, which stands in sharp contrast to the better-off parts of the city, visitors run into immigrants from Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.

“It’s harder to find a Chilean than a foreigner on these streets,” said Sandra from Colombia, in downtown Calama.

The foreign labour force is mainly engaged in domestic service, in the case of women, and in professional and technical jobs or manual labour in mining or construction, in the case of men.

A significant number of immigrant women are also involved in prostitution, traditionally a service in high demand in mining towns, where there are many men on their own.

Meanwhile, the profits raked in by the Calama casino grow around 10 percent a year, and the city’s commercial centre receives over 10 million visitors a year.

“A miner with little experience can start out earning nearly one million pesos (some 1,500 dollars) a month, and the wages just go up from there,” Jaime Meza told IPS. He works in a company that provides consulting services in social responsibility to mining companies, which leads him to constantly visit the mines.

But life in this city is expensive. One kilo of bread, a staple of the Chilean diet, costs over two dollars, and typical housing for a middle-class family costs 150,000 dollars. But “there is money and people willing to pay,” a local shopkeeper told IPS.

By contrast, the minimum wage in Chile is just 350 dollars a month, and many immigrants in Calama earn only half that, since they work without any formal job contract or social security coverage.

The inequality is put on display when the mining companies pay their workers special bonuses at the end of each collective bargaining session.

The bonuses are worth thousands of dollars and local businesses simultaneously launch special sales to draw in customers.

“The contrasts in this city are tremendous. The miners line up every Friday to withdraw money and go out carousing, spending it on women and alcohol,” taxi driver Francisco Muñoz told IPS.

“The differences are very extreme,” added Muñoz, who was born in Calama and has lived here all his life.

The taxi driver said the situation got worse about seven years ago, when CODELCO decided to move the Chuquicamata mining settlement from its spot 15 km from Calama to the city itself.

Some 3,200 families were the last to be moved from the installations where the CODELCO workers lived in comfort with all the modern amenities.

The miners moved directly to homes built for them, which defined zoning in the city: to the east, the new upscale CODELCO housing, and to the west and the north, the poorer parts of town.

“The miners bought these houses at preferential prices, and CODELCO gave them a bonus so they could easily afford them. But now they are selling them at exorbitant prices. It’s almost inconceivable to think of buying a house in Calama. An ordinary person can only afford (subsidised) state housing, never one of the houses they are selling,” Meza said.

The inequality in mineral-rich Calama led in 2009 to a wave of protests demanding that the municipality receive five percent of the revenue brought in by copper, the country’s main source of wealth.

In 2014 alone, Chile produced 5.7 million tons of copper – 31.2 percent of global output.

The protests over the longstanding neglect of the municipality continue to this day, under the slogan “What would Chile be without Calama?”

The demonstrations, the latest of which took place on Aug. 27, are “a predictable outburst,” in the view of anthropologist Juan Carlos Skewes.

“That’s good, because what big outburst do is broaden the avenues of participation,” he told IPS.

He added that the protests will undoubtedly continue as long as there is no concrete response to the demands for more equitable distribution of mining profits in Chile – of which Calama sees very little, even though the mines are in its territory.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

In Guyana the coastal belt is protected by seawall barriers that have existed since the Dutch occupation of the country, keeping the coastline as in tact as possible. Credit: Desmond Wilson/IPS

By Desmond Brown
Jun 25 2015 (IPS)

Guyana’s new president, David Granger, sits down with IPS correspondent Desmond Brown to talk about how his country is preparing for climate change – and hoping to avert the worst before it happens.

Nearly 90 per cent of Guyana’s population lives on a narrow coastline strip a half to one metre below sea level. That coastal belt is protected by seawall barriers that have existed since the Dutch occupation of the country. In recent times, however, severe storms have toppled these defences, resulting in significant flooding, a danger scientists predict may become more frequent.

The government is now spending six million dollars annually on drainage and irrigation and requires some 100 million dollars to adapt its drainage infrastructure to deal with the effects of climate change.

Mister Granger what would you say are the primary challenges for Guyana as a result of climate change?

David Granger: There are several challenges, Guyana has various, it’s not an island as you know, it’s part of the continental landmass, but we have varying ecological and geographical zones, for example on the coastline which is low and flat the climate is actually slightly different to the inland, the forested mountainous areas, rain-heavy, part of the Amazonian rain-forest, and deeper south, closer to Brazil, we have a completely different terrain landscape of savannah grassland and the savannahs have a long wet season which is now taking place and a long dry season. On the coastline we have a long dry season and a long wet season and a short dry season and a short wet season, but in the savannahs we only have one long dry season and a long wet season and sometimes in the long wet seasons there’s flooding.

President David Granger of Guyana knows how important mitigating climate change is and the need to protect his country’s shores. Credit: Desmond Wilson/IPS

So when we speak of climate change we are speaking of very complex geographical phenomena, it is not just one, although we don’t have the experience of damages of hurricanes or volcanoes or quakes, we do have very complex weather patterns, up to a month ago there was a drought and now there’s a flood, sometimes we can move from one extreme to the next. So these factors are complicated by the exploitation of some of our resources for example timber. And as you know we are part of the Amazonian rainforest and to the extent that we cut down our trees, it could lead to all sorts of environmental problems, desertification and to the extent that there’s mining that could lead to the contamination of our rivers. So these are other matters that concern us because with the changing climate it means that eventually temperatures could become higher and hotter and life as we know it less comfortable. We need the trees. The trees are the lungs of the earth so we need to be careful that we do not damage our forests, so those are some of the main challenges those are some of the main concerns.

IPS: What then would be your administration’s policy on this the issue of climate change?

DG: Well of course we have to plan a policy or we have to chart a course that protects our citizens and traditionally as far as coastal zone management is concerned we have had to build sea defenses and build proper drainage and irrigation works, otherwise our people would be flooded up. We had a terrible flood exactly 10 years ago and this is the tenth anniversary of 2005 and in many of the communities on the coast we lost billions of dollars because of the flood so we have to protect our people from that type of catastrophe. We just have to continue what we’ve been doing traditionally, building sea walls, but we also have to implement plans to prevent the excessive cutting down of all trees and of course re-forestation to plant back areas that have been mined-out in the mining areas or the trees that have been cut down in the forested areas.

IPS: What kind of strategies and action plans would you say are needed to deal with the effects of climate change in Guyana?

DG: First of all it’s coastal-zone management, as you know much of the coastline of Guyana is below the level of the ocean at tide watermark, and as the oceans rise there is evidence that the entire coastal zone is under threat, as you drive along the coast you’d see that the Dutch had to establish concrete walls, sea walls and from time to time those walls are damaged by the fierce tides, the waves of the Atlantic they come crumbling the skids so that’s very expensive to maintain and that’s the ever-present threat, sea-level rising towards sea defenses, accompanying that of course is drainage when the water comes on the land it has to be removed, the most efficient way of removing it is with mechanical drainage, using pumps and that too is a great challenge because it’s a very expensive job and then the accessories for the surplus water on the land we have to use mechanical means to remove it. Apart from that Guyana has always been susceptible to variations in climate.

IPS: On the issue of funding most countries in the region say they don’t have the funds necessary to adapt to climate change, what’s the situation for Guyana?

DG: Well we’ve been a beneficiary of some grants from Norway and we are aware of this problem, it is not a new problem as I said it’s something that has existed from time immemorial. We’ve always had the cycle of droughts and floods just like other countries in the Caribbean and have to prepare for hurricanes, we just have to prepare for climate change, so I don’t regard this as something we should be alarmed about. The big expenditure will come if we ever have to move from the coastline and go for the inland which is higher, most of the inland territory maybe 50km from here so most of the territory is higher and the sort of doomsday scenario is that you may have to abandon some part of the coastline and that would be a tremendous cost, that would be something that we don’t want to contemplate. But you can never tell when a catastrophe could strike but I would say that as part of our policy which we’ve already announced that profits and revenues from extractive industries, gold, timber, diamonds, bauxite would be used in something called the “Sovereign Wealth Fund” so that our children don’t have face the ravages of poverty. What I’m saying is something that we have to include in our calculations in our budgets but I mention the Sovereign Wealth Fund and I mention we must start putting aside money in order to prepare for any form of catastrophe, we can’t depend on handouts all the time, but yes if we had to move it would be a tremendous cost. If we had a flood it will be at a tremendous cost and even drought is a tremendous cost.

(End)

The northern town of Buka was the focus of attention when the newly elected third Autonomous Bougainville Government was inaugurated on Jun. 15. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

By Catherine Wilson
CANBERRA, Australia, Jun 24 2015 (IPS)

A referendum on independence within the next five years dominated campaigning in the recent general election held in Bougainville, an autonomous region of 300,000 people in the east of Papua New Guinea (PNG), which emerged from a decade-long civil war 15 years ago.

John Momis, a former Catholic priest who has been prominent in national politics for more than 40 years, was re-elected as president, acquiring 51,382 votes, well ahead of his nearest rival with 18,466.

“We are on the threshold of perhaps the most important and portentous five years in our history and to achieve all that is necessary in that period will require great unity, a tremendous sense of purpose, intense energy and an unwavering commitment to the course we intend to follow." -- John Momis, newly-elected president of Bougainville
He is Bougainville’s most experienced politician and peacetime leader and has won two of the three elections held since the formation of the Autonomous Bougainville Government (ABG) in 2005.

“We are on the threshold of perhaps the most important and portentous five years in our history and to achieve all that is necessary in that period will require great unity, a tremendous sense of purpose, intense energy and an unwavering commitment to the course we intend to follow,” Momis stated during the inauguration ceremony of the new government in the northern town of Buka on Jun. 15.

For the majority of candidates and more than 172,000 enrolled voters, the referendum, provided for in the 2001 Bougainville Peace Agreement, symbolises their long held desire to reclaim political and economic control over the islands.

For more than a century, Bougainville was administered by Germany, Britain and then Australia before being incorporated into the state of Papua New Guinea upon its independence in 1975.

Then from 1989 to 1997 armed conflict erupted over grievances about inequity and environmental damage associated with the Panguna copper mine in Central Bougainville, operated by the Australian-owned Rio Tinto subsidiary, Bougainville Copper Ltd, which further entrenched indigenous resolve for autonomy.

More than 50 percent of the mine’s revenues of around two billion dollars from 1972 to 1989 were claimed by British mining giant, Rio Tinto, and 19.06 percent by the PNG Government. Now the people of Bougainville want ownership of the region’s development and its benefits.

Peter Arwin, a landowner in Central Bougainville, told IPS that he “would like to see the government entering into serious negotiations on referendum and eventual independence for Bougainville as this will give the landowners opportunity to take part in independent decisions over our resources.”

Women are adamant, too, that their voices will be heard in public debate and decision-making after they were successful in gaining four of the 39 parliamentary seats. Three of the 35 female candidates took reserved seats and a fourth, Josephine Getsi, won the open constituency of Peit in Buka.

Barbara Tanne, executive officer of the Bougainville Women’s Federation, said that the government must “focus on the path to achieving a peace at the end by addressing the three pillars of the peace agreement” by 2020, the date by which the referendum is to be held. These include good governance and successful disarmament.

Recent reports indicate that about 2,000 arms are still in the possession of communities and former militia groups and restoring unity across the region through post-conflict reconciliation remains an ongoing process.

From the grassroots to the elite, expectations of independence as the key to a better future and the improvement of people’s lives are immense and the incoming government has acknowledged the challenges.

“Since the late 1990s we have made progress in restoring health and education services destroyed during the conflict. But service standards are worse than before the conflict. The ABG [Autonomous Bougainville Government] must solve the problems faced by our people,” Momis declared during his inauguration speech.

An urgent priority is addressing high unemployment and illiteracy among youth who make up more than 50 percent of the population. Meanwhile an estimated 56 percent of people in Central Bougainville do not have access to safe drinking water, and hardship in families is being impacted by violence against women, worsened by untreated post-conflict trauma.

The first hurdle to surmount is, even with a majority yes vote at referendum, full self-government depends on a joint agreement with the PNG government that the conditions of the peace agreement have been met.

Fiscal self-reliance – crucial for delivering infrastructure and services – is another, with 89 percent of the Bougainville government’s revenues last year, totaling 312 million kina (114 million dollars), provided by the PNG Government and international donors.

Options debated by the region’s leaders for increasing government revenues include a return to mining and developing the agricultural industry.

Over the next half decade, the new autonomous government has much to live up to, most of all the people’s hopes and dreams of progress toward equality and inclusive development.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Artisanal diamond miners at work in the alluvial diamond mines around the eastern town of Koidu, Sierra Leone. Credit: Tommy Trenchard/IPS

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram and Rudi von Arnim
ROME, Jun 23 2015 (IPS)

After the turn of the century, growth in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) picked up again after a quarter century of near stagnation for most, mainly due to increased world demand for minerals and other natural resources.

The region became second only to East Asia in recovering from the global slowdown following the 2008-2009 financial crisis.Thanks to the failure of development over the preceding quarter century, SSA was the only region not to make any progress in reducing the population share in poverty, with the number of poor people actually rising significantly.

During the decade 2003-2013, growth was faster, averaging 2.6 percent per capita annually. The SSA growth acceleration of the past decade fueled hopes that growth on the continent had finally begun to accelerate and catch up.

Annual SSA per capita real GDP growth had averaged a respectable two percent in the 1960s, but had slowed down from the late 1970s. Over the next two decades, real per capita income for sub-Saharan countries shrank by about three quarters of a percentage point annually on average.

While SSA growth resumed in the last decade, reliance on natural resource extraction has compromised its developmental impact. Such economic activity, especially in mining, has few linkages to the rest of the national economy, thus limiting its growth and employment creation impacts as well.

As its economic performance has closely followed the vagaries of the global commodity price cycle, SSA growth in the last decade was largely driven by the minerals boom on the continent.

But the high commodity prices of the past decade have been reversed by the spreading global economic slowdown and the Saudi decision to drastically reduce oil prices.

However, natural resource extraction does not have the same potential to accelerate development as manufacturing. No country has successfully developed without substantially increasing manufacturing or high-end services. Sub-Saharan Africa has not done well on this score in recent decades.

While the manufacturing share of GDP for all developing countries has risen over 23 percent, it has fallen in SSA to 8 percent from 12 percent in the 1980s. Meanwhile, the primary commodities’ share of total SSA exports reached almost 90 percent in the past decade.

Premature and inappropriate trade liberalisation has damaged SSA’s limited export capacities. The region’s share of world merchandise exports fell from 5 percent in the 1950s to 1.8 percent during 2000-2010. Meanwhile, its share of world manufactured exports stands at a paltry one-fifth of one percentage point.

Trade liberalisation has also undermined the fiscal capacities of many governments in poor countries, with dire consequences for development and social progress.

Since many transactions in developing countries are informal, and hence untaxed, poor developing country governments have traditionally relied on trade tariffs to raise revenue.

Thus, trade liberalisation has reduced their ability to raise revenue, without providing alternate sources. As a consequence, the share of government spending in GDP has fallen from an average of around 16 percent during 1980-1999 to 13 percent during recent years.

Thus, neither trade nor financial liberalisation has helped accelerate economic growth in SSA. Growth requires investments, but investment as a share of SSA GDP has fallen in recent decades, to only 17 percent before the crisis.

External financial liberalisation from the 1980s was supposed to draw in foreign resources, but portfolio investments in SSA are negligible, and more crucially, ill-suited to facilitate sustainable growth.

Instead, there have been net outflows of capital from the world’s poorest region to international financial centres, including tax havens.

Appropriately targeted ‘greenfield’ foreign direct investment (FDI) has more potential to make a positive impact. However, Africa’s share of FDI to all developing economies has fallen from 21 percent in the 1970s to only 11 percent in recent years, or from 5 percent to 3 percent of global FDI.

To make matters worse, FDI in SSA overwhelmingly involves natural resource extraction, with few developmental spillovers from such investments.

According to World Bank estimates, the share of the SSA population living in extreme poverty rose from 50 percent in 1980 to 58 percent in 1998 before falling back to 50 percent in 2005.

Thanks to the failure of development over the preceding quarter century, SSA was the only region not to make any progress in reducing the population share in poverty, with the number of poor people actually rising significantly.

A decade ago, in 2005, the G8 summit at Gleneagles committed to increasing Official Development Assistance (ODA) by 50 billion dollars by 2010. The Gleneagles summit also promised to increase ODA to Africa by 25 billion dollars to 64 billion. Actual delivery fell short by 18 billion dollars, or by 72 percent!

In 2012 dollars, annual ODA to SSA hovered around 50 billion during 2006-2013, up from about 42 billion in 2005, but well short of what was promised. G8 aid to Africa falls well short of promised levels, even below the contributions from the small Nordic countries.

Not surprisingly, the recent G7 summit made no reference to the Gleneagles promises. Instead, it focused on addressing climate change, and it seems likely that climate finance conditionalities will undermine the principle of common, but differentiated responsibilities.

The struggle leading to the Conference of Parties in Paris will be to ensure that climate finance will be additional to the longstanding ODA promises, and will promote climate justice and development.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

Cascada Barba de Abuelo, a waterfall in Aitken Park in the southern Chilean region of Aysén. Although the region has some of the world’s biggest freshwater reserves, local residents have to pay for the water they use for household needs and irrigation. Credit: Marianela Jarroud/IPS

By Marianela Jarroud
SANTIAGO, May 27 2015 (IPS)

Family farmers in Chile are pushing for the reinstatement of water as a public good, to at least partially solve the shortages caused by the privatisation of water rights by the military dictatorship in 1981.

“Why should we pay for water rights if the people who were born and grew up in the countryside always had access to water?” Patricia Mancilla, a rural women’s community organiser in the southern region of Patagonia, remarked to Tierramérica.

That is a question echoed by small farmers throughout Chile.

This long, narrow country is rich in water, but it is unequally distributed: while to the south of Santiago annual freshwater availability per capita is over 10,000 cubic metres, it is less than 800 cubic metres per capita in the north, according to a 2011 World Bank study.

But the 1980 constitution made water private property, and the Water Code gives the state the authority to grant use rights to companies free of charge and in perpetuity. Water use is regulated by the Code, according to the rules of the free market.

The laissez-faire Code allows water use rights to be bought, sold or leased, without taking into consideration local priorities and needs, such as drinking water.

“Chile is the only country in the world to have privatised its water sources and water management,” activist Rodrigo Mundaca, secretary general of the Movement for the Defence of Water, Land and the Environment (MODATIMA), told Tierramérica.

Mundaca, an agronomist, added that Chile’s legislation “separates ownership of water from ownership of land, giving rise to a market for water,” which means there are people who own land but have no water, and vice versa.“Water is now, without a doubt, the most important environmental issue in this country. Small farmers have lost their land, and there are municipalities like Petorca, where more than 3,000 women live on their own because their husbands and partners have gone elsewhere to find work.” -- Rodrigo Mundaca

The 1973-1990 dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet created two categories of water use rights: consumptive and non-consumptive.

Consumptive water use refers to water that is removed from available supplies without returning to a water resource system.

In this category, 73 percent of water rights have gone to agriculture, nine percent to the mining industry, 12 percent to industry and six percent to the sanitation system, Mundaca said.

Non-consumptive use refers to water that is used but not consumed. This mainly includes water withdrawn for the purpose of generating hydroelectricity, and since 2009, 81 percent of these water use rights have been in the hands of the Italian-Spanish company Enel-Endesa, the activist said.

As a result, “today the communities of northern Chile are at loggerheads with the mining corporations, over water use; the communities of central Chile with agribusiness and agroexporters; and communities in the south with hydropower plants and forestry companies,” Mundaca said.

“Water is now, without a doubt, the main environmental issue in this country. Small farmers have lost their land, and there are municipalities like Petorca, where more than 3,000 women live on their own because their husbands and partners have had to leave to find work,” he added.

Latin America in general is one of the regions most vulnerable to the crises caused by climate change, according to the World Bank. But in Chile, small farmers are less vulnerable to climate change than to the “theft” of their water by large agroexporters, activists say.

Petorca, a case in point

“The water business reflects the conflicts of interest, influence peddling and corruption in Chile,” Ricardo Sanhueza told Tierramérica. Sanhueza is a small farmer who lives in the municipality of Petorca, 220 km north of Santiago, which illustrates the impact of the water management model put in place 34 years ago.

“I remember that even though we suffered from a major drought between 1987 and 1997, we always had clean drinking water,” he said.

The 70,000 people who live in Petorca, located in the province of the same name, depend on tanker trucks for their water supply.

“The problem here isn’t related to the climate,” he said. “The problem is the over-exploitation of the land and the abusive use of water….Political interests are undermining the foundations of small-scale family farming.”

According to a study by the National Human Rights Institute (INDH), a government body, the province’s water shortages are not only caused by drought but also by “business activities in that area.”

The report also states that the granting of rights to use water sources that have been exhausted has played a part in generating a water crisis that seriously affects the quality of life of the residents of the province of Petorca.

The prioritisation of the use of water for productive activities rather than human consumption has aggravated the problem, the study goes on to say.

Mónica Flores, a psychologist with the municipal Public Health Department, told Tierramérica with nostalgia that the Petorca river had completely dried up, putting an end to social activities and community life surrounding the river.

“The river emerged in the Andes mountains and flowed to the ocean,” she said. “But today you just see a gray line full of dirt and stones.”

“It marked a before and after,” Flores said. “My childhood revolved around the river: I played there with my friends, we would swim, we would flirt with each other. But my daughter’s life isn’t the same, it’s much lonelier.

“Many rituals played out by the river, which was the heart, the spinal column of the province,” she said, stressing the impact on the local population of the drying up of the river.

But Petorca is just one example of the water problem in Chile.

On Mar. 22, World Water Day, the INDH declared that “Chile’s development cannot come at the cost of sacrificing the water of local communities, or at the cost of mortgaging the future of coming generations.”

The hydric resources commission in the lower house of Congress is currently debating a reform of the Water Code, which would represent significant advances, such as giving a priority to water use for essential needs and replacing water use rights in perpetuity with temporary rights.

But the modifications will not be retroactive, and most water use rights have already been granted.

Moreover, the water use privileges enjoyed by the mining industry will not be touched by the reform. Nor has the question of water shortages for essential uses by small farmers and indigenous communities been addressed. And there is no talk of a constitutional amendment to make water a public good once again.

The constitution put in place by the dictatorship “states that all people are free and equal in dignity and rights,” Mundaca said. “However, vast segments of the population, deprived of water, depend on tanker trucks for drinking water, can only do a quick rinse around key areas instead of showering, and go to the bathroom in plastic bags.

“It’s shameful and wrong. People have to regain access to water one way or another,” he said.

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Gutted mine machinery and infrastructure are scattered across the site of the Panguna mine in the mountains of Central Bougainville, an autonomous region in Papua New Guinea. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

By Catherine Wilson
CANBERRA, Australia, May 22 2015 (IPS)

From Arawa, once the capital city of Bougainville, an autonomous region in eastern Papua New Guinea in the southwest Pacific Ocean, a long, winding road leads high up into the Crown Prince Ranges in the centre of the island through impenetrable rainforest.

Over a ridge, the verdant canopy gives way to a landscape of gouged earth and, in the centre, a gaping crater, six kilometres long, is surrounded by the relics of gutted trucks and mine machinery rusting away into dust under the South Pacific sun.

“The crisis was a fight for all people who are oppressed in the world. During the crisis the people fought for what is right; the right of the land." -- Greg Doraa, a Panguna district chief
The place still resonates with the spirit of the indigenous Nasioi people who waged an armed struggle between 1989 and 1997, following an uprising to shut down one of the world’s largest open-cut copper mines, built with the aim of extracting the approximately one billion tonnes of ore that lay beneath the fertile land.

Operated by Bougainville Copper Limited, a subsidiary of Conzinc Rio Tinto of Australia, the Panguna mine generated about two billion dollars in revenues from 1972-1989. But the majority owners, Rio Tinto (53.58 percent) and the Papua New Guinea government (19.06 percent), received the bulk of the profits, while indigenous landowners were denied any substantive rights under the mining agreement.

Local communities watched as villages were forcibly displaced, customary land became unrecognisable under tonnes of waste rock, and the local Jaba River became contaminated with mine tailings, choking the waters and poisoning the fish.

Inequality widened as mine jobs enriched a small minority; of an estimated population in the 1980s of 150,000, about 1,300 were employed in the mine’s operating workforce.

When, in 1989, a demand for compensation of 10 billion kina (3.7 billion dollars) was refused, landowners mobilised and brought the corporate venture to a standstill by targeting its power supply and critical installations with explosives.

A civil war between the Bougainville Revolutionary Army and the Papua New Guinea Defence Forces ensued until a ceasefire brought an end to the fighting in 1997 – but not before the death toll reached an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 people, representing approximately 13 percent of the population at the time.

“The crisis was a fight for all people who are oppressed in the world. During the crisis the people fought for what is right; the right of the land,” Greg Doraa, a Panguna district chief, recounted.

Now, although the region of 300,000 people has secured a degree of autonomy from Papua New Guinea, the spectre of mining is still present, and with a general election underway, options for economic development are hotly debated.

For the political elite, only mining can generate the large revenues needed to fulfil political ambitions as a referendum on independence from PNG, to be held by 2020, approaches.

Indigenous communities continue to live around the edge of the Panguna copper mine in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, which was forced to shut down in 1989. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

But for many landowners and farming communities, a far more sustainable option would be to develop the region’s rich agricultural and eco-tourism potential.

Last year the Autonomous Bougainville Government (ABG) President John Momis stated that production in the region’s two main industries, cocoa and small-scale gold mining, mostly alluvial gold panning, was valued at about 150 million kina (55.7 million dollars).

This has boosted local incomes, but not government revenue due to the absence of taxation.

“Even if a turnover tax of 10 percent could be efficiently applied to these industries, it would produce only a small fraction of the government revenue required to support genuine autonomy,” Momis stated.

But according to Chris Baria, a local commentator on Bougainville affairs who was in Panguna at the time of the crisis, “due to the widely held perception in the government that mining is a quick and easy way out of cash shortage problems, there has been a lack of real focus on the agricultural and manufacturing sectors.”

“Bougainville has rich soil for growing crops, which can be sold as raw products or value-added to fetch good prices on the global market. Bougainville is also a potential tourist destination if the infrastructure is developed to cater for it.”

Last year the drawdown of mining powers from PNG to the autonomous region was completed with the passing of a transitional mining bill.

But at the grassroots many fear that a return to large-scale mining will lead to similar forms of inequity. Economic exclusion, which saw 94 percent of the estimated two billion dollars in revenue going to shareholders and the PNG government and 1.4 percent to local landowners, was a key factor that galvanised the Nasioi people to take up arms 25 years ago.

Rusting infrastructure in Central Bougainville still resonates with the spirit of the indigenous Nasioi people who waged an armed struggle between 1989 and 1997, following an uprising to shut down one of the world’s largest open-cut copper mines. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

“Current development trends will only benefit the educated elite and politicians who have access to opportunities through employment and commissions paid by the resource developers to come in and extract the resources,” Baria claims, “[while] ordinary people become mere spectators to all that is happening in their midst.”

Since the 2001 peace agreement, reconstruction has been slow, with the Autonomous Bougainville Government still financially dependent on the government of Papua New Guinea and international donors.

In some places, for example, roads and bridges have been repaired, airports opened, and police resources improved. But there is also incomplete disarmament, poor rural access to basic services and high rates of domestic and sexual violence exacerbated by largely untreated post-conflict trauma.

The province has just 10 doctors serving more than a quarter of a million people, less than one percent of people are connected to electricity and life expectancy is just 59 years.

Less than five percent of the population has access to sanitation, reports World Vision, and one third of children are not in school, in addition to a “lost generation” of youth who missed out on education during the conflict years.

Thus economic development must also serve long-term peace, experts say.

Delwin Ketsian, president of the Bougainville Women in Agriculture development organisation, told IPS, “Eighty percent of Bougainville women do not support the reopening of the mine. Bougainville is a matrilineal [society], our land is our resource and we [want] to toil our own land, instead of foreigners coming in to destroy it.” In North and Central Bougainville, women are the traditional landowners.

A recent study of 82 people living in the mine-affected area showed strong support for the development of horticulture, animal farming, fisheries and fish farming.

“The government should support farmers to go into vegetable farming, cocoa, copra, spices and fishing, then proceed to downstream processing which we women believe will boost the economy of Bougainville, thus also improving our livelihoods and earning sustainable incomes,” Ketsian said.

Prior to mining operations, communities in the Panguna area practised subsistence and small-holder agriculture, with families planting crops like taro and breadfruit trees, and fishing in the river. But the mine destroyed the soil and water, so that traditional crops no longer grow as they used to, according to local residents.

Before the civil war, cocoa was the mainstay of up to 77 percent of rural families with those in the mine-affected area earning on average 807 kina (299 dollars) per year, higher than mine compensation payments of 500 kina (185 dollars) per annum.

While the conflict decimated production from 12,903 tons in 1988 to 2,619 tons in 1996, it had rebounded about 48 percent by 2006. Still the sector’s growth has been constrained by poor transportation, training and market access, the cocoa pod borer pest, which has impacted harvests in the region’s north since 2009, and the substantial control of trade and export by companies located in other provinces, such as nearby East New Britain.

Kofi Nouveau, the World Bank’s senior agriculture economist believes that investment in the cocoa industry should focus on farmer training, planting of new high performing pest resistant plants and improving the overall product quality.

Baria also said that education should focus on developing people’s self-reliance.

“We have creative and talented people in Bougainville […] but the system of education we have teaches people to work for other people. We should adopt education and training that enables a person to create opportunity and not dependency,” he advocated.

After a new government is announced in June, the people of Bougainville face critical decisions about their future during the next five years. But if development justice is vital for a peaceful and sustainable future, then history should urge caution about economic dependence on mineral resources.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

This article is part of a special series entitled ‘The Future Is Now: Inside the World’s Most Sustainable Communities’. Read other articles in the series here.

This reporting series was conceived in collaboration with Ecosocialist Horizons

Date palm trees abound in the Niyamgiri hills of the Indian state of Odisha. The fruits contain antioxidants and Vitamin A, and the sap is collected and fermented to produce liquor. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

By Manipadma Jena
RAYAGADA, India, May 19 2015 (IPS)

Scattered across 240 sq km on the remote Niyamgiri hill range in the eastern Indian state of Odisha, an ancient tribal group known as the Dongria Kondh have earned themselves a reputation as trailblazers.

Having fought – and won – a decade-long battle with a British mining giant that invested close to a billion dollars in a bauxite extraction operation in this mineral-rich area, the Dongria Kondh set an example in 2013 to millions of tribal people around the world that David versus Goliath-style confrontations can still be won by the underdog.

Now, the indigenous group is once again at the forefront of a global problem – the twin issues of hunger and deforestation – as they continue to nurture an ancient way of life despite a wave of destructive development that is threatening their traditional and sustainable farming practices.

Here, a Dongria Kondh woman reaches for barada leaves, a vital source of iron for the community. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

Numbering some 10,000 people, the Dongria Kondh believe the forests and hills to be sacred sites, and have for centuries lived in harmony with the land, with a single family harvesting an average of 130 kg of wild produce in a single year.

Their varied and nutritious diet, which includes over 25 species of plants, comes directly from the forests, while springs originating in the Niyamgiri hills provide fresh, clean water all year round.

But rampant deforestation for large-scale infrastructure projects, coupled with mono-culture plantations of fast-growing trees to supply timber and paper industries with raw materials, as well as mining activities, have reduced food availability for the Dongria Kondh and other indigenous groups by over 30 percent and increased their gathering time by 80 percent over the last 30 years.

Today, 55 percent of adults from the Dongria Kondh community are protein-energy deficient and 60 percent of school-aged children are malnourished.

The situation reflects a trend all across India, a country of 1.2 billion people, where some of the poorest and hungriest live in or around forests.

India is currently home to one-quarter of the 805 million malnourished people worldwide, as well as to a third of the world’s underweight children and nearly a third of all food-insecure people – most of them among the 275 million-strong forest-dwelling population of this vast country.

The irony of the fact that those living closest to readily available food sources are going hungry has not escaped the attention of policy-makers, with the United Nations spearheading efforts to protect forests due to their critical importance in alleviating hunger and mitigating the impacts of climate change, not just in India but worldwide.

With 1.6 billion people – including over 2,000 indigenous cultures – depending directly on forests for food, shelter, income and fuel, preserving these areas feeds directly into the U.N.’s sustainable development agenda, and could also play a role in the ‘Zero Hunger Challenge’, launched by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in 2012 in a bid to completely eradicate the scourge of malnutrition and food insecurity.

This is easier said than done, given that an estimated 13 million hectares of forests are destroyed annually, denying hundreds of thousands of people of their only source of food.

While this seems like a bleak trend, one need only look up at the Niyamgiri hills for a lesson on an alternative economic model, one based on community management and control of land and resources, rather than the rampant destruction of living ecosystems for profit.

Here in Odisha, the forest-food nexus meets the accumulated traditional knowledge of an ancient people, pointing the way to a horizon where hunger is a thing of the past, not the future.

A major reason for the Dongria Kondh’s opposition to Vedanta Resource’s bauxite mining in the Niyamgiri Mountains in the eastern Indian state of Odisha was that it would destroy their numerous perennial hill streams. Here, a tribal girl washes at a pipe that gushes fresh water 24 hours a day. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

Date palm trees abound in the Niyamgiri hills of the Indian state of Odisha. The fruits contain antioxidants and Vitamin A, and the sap is collected and fermented to produce liquor. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

Tribal women collect fistfuls of ‘broom grass’ from the hill slopes of the Niyamgiri range in Odisha, India. Bundles tied together with hemp rope sell for 60 cents apiece in village markets, though urban traders get double the price. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

Rich in protein, young bamboo shoots are a delicacy among the Dongria Kondh tribal community in eastern India. The outer skin is boiled with salt and chilli as a source of nutrition. During the monsoon season, when the shoots are plentiful, members of the tribe earn an income from bamboo. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

The ‘barada’ leafy green is sweet, easy to digest and rich in iron. Here, a tribal woman sun-dries the leaves so they can be stored for up to two months. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

Women shoulder the lion’s share of forest produce collection. A typical day’s haul includes tamarind, which fetches a large part of a household’s annual income, and wild yams, a dietary mainstay during the lean months of August to October. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

The highly valued mahua flowers are collected, dried and made into liquor. Its seeds yield oil that can be used for cooking. Among some tribal groups mahua paste is used medicinally to facilitate childbirth. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

Honey is the Dongria Kondh’s most precious forest product, valued for its nutrition, medicinal properties and high returns from sale. Because the tribe manages and protects large sections of the Niyamgiri hills in the eastern Indian state of Odisha, hundreds of wild honeybee colonies can still be found here. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

Freshly fermented liquor made from the sap of the Salapa palm tree is often used during rituals. This is one of seven trees considered a ‘must’ in the Dongria Kondh’s sacred grove. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Tribal women collect fistfuls of ‘broom grass’ from the hill slopes of the Niyamgiri range in Odisha, India. Bundles tied together with hemp rope sell for 60 cents apiece in village markets, though urban traders get double the price. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

By Manipadma Jena
RAYAGADA, India, May 19 2015 (IPS)

Scattered across 240 sq km on the remote Niyamgiri hill range in the eastern Indian state of Odisha, an ancient tribal group known as the Dongria Kondh have earned themselves a reputation as trailblazers.

Having fought – and won – a decade-long battle with a British mining giant that invested close to a billion dollars in a bauxite extraction operation in this mineral-rich area, the Dongria Kondh set an example in 2013 to millions of tribal people around the world that David versus Goliath-style confrontations can still be won by the underdog.

Now, the indigenous group is once again at the forefront of a global problem – the twin issues of hunger and deforestation – as they continue to nurture an ancient way of life despite a wave of destructive development that is threatening their traditional and sustainable farming practices.

But rampant deforestation for large-scale infrastructure projects, coupled with mono-culture plantations of fast-growing trees to supply timber and paper industries with raw materials, as well as mining activities, have reduced food availability for the Dongria Kondh and other indigenous groups by over 30 percent and increased their gathering time by 80 percent over the last 30 years.

Today, 55 percent of adults from the Dongria Kondh community are protein-energy deficient and 60 percent of school-aged children are malnourished.

The situation reflects a trend all across India, a country of 1.2 billion people, where some of the poorest and hungriest live in or around forests.

India is currently home to one-quarter of the 805 million malnourished people worldwide, as well as to a third of the world’s underweight children and nearly a third of all food-insecure people – most of them among the 275 million-strong forest-dwelling population of this vast country.

The irony of the fact that those living closest to readily available food sources are going hungry has not escaped the attention of policy-makers, with the United Nations spearheading efforts to protect forests due to their critical importance in alleviating hunger and mitigating the impacts of climate change, not just in India but worldwide.

With 1.6 billion people – including over 2,000 indigenous cultures – depending directly on forests for food, shelter, income and fuel, preserving these areas feeds directly into the U.N.’s sustainable development agenda, and could also play a role in the ‘Zero Hunger Challenge’, launched by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in 2012 in a bid to completely eradicate the scourge of malnutrition and food insecurity.

This is easier said than done, given that an estimated 13 million hectares of forests are destroyed annually, denying hundreds of thousands of people of their only source of food.

While this seems like a bleak trend, one need only look up at the Niyamgiri hills for a lesson on an alternative economic model, one based on community management and control of land and resources, rather than the rampant destruction of living ecosystems for profit.

Here in Odisha, the forest-food nexus meets the accumulated traditional knowledge of an ancient people, pointing the way to a horizon where hunger is a thing of the past, not the future.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

The town of Ilhéus in the Northeast Brazilian state of Bahia, part of whose coastline will be modified by the construction of the Porto Sul port complex, which environmentalists and local residents are protesting because of the serious ecological and social damage it will cause. Credit: Courtesy Instituto Nossa Ilhéus

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 24 2015 (IPS)

Activists and local residents have brought legal action aimed at blocking the construction of a nearly 50 sq km port terminal in the Northeast Brazilian state of Bahia because of the huge environmental and social impacts it will have.

The biggest project of its kind in Brazil has given rise to several court battles. With a budget of 2.2 billion dollars, Porto Sul will be built in Aratiguá, on the outskirts of the city of Ilhéus, at the heart of the Cocoa Coast’s long stretches of heavenly beaches, where the locals have traditionally depended on tourism and the production of cocoa for a living.

The courts have ordered four precautionary measures against the project, while civil society movements say they will not stop fighting the projected mega-port with legal action and protests.

The Porto Sul port complex will be financed by the Brazilian government, through its growth acceleration programme, which focuses largely on the construction of infrastructure.

Construction of the deepwater port and the complex will employ 2,500 people at its peak. But the project is staunchly opposed by locals and by social organisations because of what activists have described as the “unprecedented” environmental impact it will have.

Critics of the project have dubbed it the “Belo Monte of Bahia” – a reference to the huge hydroelectric dam being built on the Xingú river in the northern Amazon jungle state of Pará, which will be the third-largest in the world in terms of generation capacity.

Environmentalists protest that the new port terminal and its logistical and industrial zone will hurt an ecological corridor that connects two natural protected areas.

These are the 93-sq-km Sierra de Conduru State Park, which boasts enormous biodiversity in flora and fauna, and the 4.4-sq-km Boa Esperança Municipal Park in the urban area of Ilhéus, which is a refuge for rare species and a freshwater sanctuary.

Construction of the port complex “shows a lack of respect for the region’s natural vocation, which is tourism and conservation. Since 2008 we have been fighting to show that the project is not viable,” activist Maria Mendonça, president of the Nossa Ilhéus Institute, dedicated to social monitoring of public policies, told IPS.

Ilhéus, a city of 180,000 people, has the longest coastline in the state, and is famous as the scenario for several novels by renowned Bahia writer Jorge Amado, such as “Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon”.

Digital view of a small part of the future Porto Sul port complex in Aratiguá, in the Northeast Brazilian city of Ilhéus. Credit: Bahia state government

The project’s environmental impact study, carried out in 2013, identified 36 potential environmental impacts, 42 percent of which could not be mitigated. Some of them will affect marine species that will be driven away by the construction work, including dolphins and whales. The project will also kill fauna living on the ocean floor.

Aratiguá, the epicentre of the Porto Sul port, “is an important fishing location in the region, where more than 10,000 people who depend on small-scale fishing along a 10-km stretch of the shoreline clean their catch,” Mendonça said.

An estimated 100 million tons of earth will be moved in this ecologically fragile region, where environmentalists are sounding the alarm while authorities and the company promise economic development and jobs, in a socioeconomically depressed area.

Social and environmental activist Ismail Abéde is one of 800 people living in the Vila Juerana coastal community, who will be displaced by the port complex project.

“The erosion will stretch 10 km to the north of the port, where we live, and the sea will penetrate up to 100 metres inland. It will be a catastrophe,” Abéde complained to IPS.

He pointed out that the complex was originally to form part of the Projeto Pedra de Ferro project.

That project, operated by Bahia Mineração (Bamin), a national company owned by Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation (ENRC) and Zamin Ferrous, is to extract an estimated 20 million tons of iron ore a year in Caetité, a city of 46,000 people in the interior of the state.

The iron ore will be transported on a new 400-km Caetité-Ilhéus railway, built mainly to carry the mineral to Bamin’s own shipping terminal in Porto Sul.

The mining project was granted an environmental permit in November 2012 and an operating license in June 2014.

Meanwhile, the Porto Sul complex received a building permit on Sep. 19, 2014, and construction is to begin within a year of that date at the latest. The complex is to be up and running by the end of 2019.

Porto Sul, the biggest port being built in Northeast Brazil and one of the largest logistical structures, will be the country’s third-largest port,l moving 60 million tons in its first 10 years of activity.

The main connection with the complex will be by rail. But an international airport is also to be built in its area of influence, as well as new roads and a gas pipeline.

The interconnected Projeto Pedra de Ferro requires a 1.5 billion dollar investment, and the mine’s productive potential is 398 million tons, which would mean a useful life of 20 years.

“The mine is not sustainable and the railway to carry the mineral to the port runs through protected areas and local communities,” Mendonça complained.

Activists argue that iron ore dust, a toxic pollutant, will be spread through the region while it is transported, affecting cocoa crops and the rivers crossed by the railroad.

Abedé also protested the way the company has informed the families that will be affected by either of the two projects. He said neither the company nor the authorities have offered consultation or dialogue.

“The state can expropriate property when it is for the collective good, not for a private international company,” he said.

The Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation (ENRC), a United Kingdom-based multinational, was delisted from the London Stock Exchange in November 2013, accused of fraud and corruption.

“We are preparing reports that we will present to public banks to keep them from financing the projects,” said Abedé, referring to one of the measures the activists plan to take to fight the project, along with court action.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

The Ojancos tailings dam abandoned by the Sali Hochschild mining company, which spilled toxic waste after the late March thunderstorm that caused flooding in northern Chile. The waste reached the Copiapó river and the water supply on the outskirts of the city of Copiapó. Credit: Courtesy Relaves.org

By Marianela Jarroud
SANTIAGO, Apr 21 2015 (IPS)

Chile lives under the constant threat of spillage from tailings ponds, which became even more marked in late March after heavy rains fell in the desert region of Atacama leaving over two dozen people dead and missing and thousands without a home.

Copiapó, capital of the region of the same name, 800 km north of Santiago, is in an area full of tailings dams, Henry Jurgens, the founder of the non-governmental organisation Relaves (Tailings), told Tierramérica.

He explained that pollution with heavy metals “was already a reality” before the recent thunderstorm and flooding, but that the catastrophe “made this reality visible and more severe.”

In early April, the organisation detected tailings pond spills when it took water and mud samples in different parts of the Atacama region. But the government’s National Geology and Mining Service (Sernageomin) reported that the tailings impoundments that hold toxic waste are in stable condition.

The Atacama desert, the world’s driest, was the main natural area affected by the flooding caused by the Mar. 23-24 heavy rainfall, which dropped the equivalent of one-quarter of a normal year’s precipitation on the area.

Experts say the rain may have stirred up heavy metals lying quietly in abandoned ponds.

Tailings, the materials left over after valuable minerals are separated from ore, contain water, chemicals and heavy metals such as cyanide, arsenic, zinc and mercury, deposited in open-air ponds or impoundments.

These toxic substances build up in the body and cause serious health problems.

Arsenic, for example, has no color, odor or taste, which makes it undetectable by people who consume it. Experts warn that long-term exposure to high levels of arsenic in drinking water can cause cancer of the skin, lungs or bladder.

The main source of wealth in this mining country is copper. In 2014 alone, this country of 17.5 million people produced 5.7 billion tons of copper, 31.2 percent of the world total.

But for each ton of fine copper produced, 100 tons of soil with toxic by-products must be removed and stored.

There are 449 identified tailings ponds in this country, according to official figures. But there are dozens of others that have not been “georeferenced,” another member of Relaves, Raimundo Gómez, complained to Tierramérica.

The dusty exterior of the División de El Teniente, the world’s biggest copper mine, located in the Andes mountains 150 km south of Santiago. Solid and liquid waste products are treated in the mine and sulfur emissions are controlled. But that is not the case in all of the country’s mines. Credit: Marianela Jarroud/IPS

“There is no real register of abandoned tailings ponds in the country,” said Gómez. “Sernageomin estimates that there are 90 of these toxic deposits in the Atacama region alone. That is really a lot.”

He also noted that “there is a great lack of information about the issue; communities do not know that they are living next to tailings ponds, and people are unaware of the danger that they pose to health and that they pollute the water.”

“We can see the profits left by mining. But we don’t see the negative effects, which we all end up paying in the end,” Gómez said. “It’s like when you go to a dinner and you talk about how delicious it was, but you don’t tell what you did in the bathroom afterwards.”

The earthquake that shook Chile on Feb. 27, 2010 caused the collapse of an abandoned tailings pile that buried an entire family under tons of toxic sludge.

The victims, a couple and their two children, worked on the farm where Jurgens and his family lived for six years near the southern town of Pencahue, unaware that they were living next to a toxic, unstable tailings pile.

“It wasn’t till then that I found out what it was, and all the things that could happen,” he said.

“People are totally ignorant about this. They’re often drinking polluted water and aren’t warned by the relevant institutions….That’s just humiliating and terrible,” Jurgens said.

Although experts say the worst risk is posed by abandoned tailings dumps, the ones that are still in use can also be dangerous.

That is the case of Caimanes, a town of 1,000 located near the El Mauro tailings dam of the company Los Pelambres, the sixth-largest copper producer in Chile, which belongs to the Luksic’s, the richest family in the country.

El Mauro, which in the Diaguita indigenous language means the place where the water spouts, is located eight km upriver from Caimanes.

The seven km-long dam, with a wall 270 metres high, is the biggest chemical waste dump in Latin America.

The dump has hurt the local biodiversity and polluted the water used by the people of the town.

The main study on water pollution by tailings ponds, carried out in 2011 by Andrei Tchernitchin at the University of Chile, found high levels of heavy metals in a number of rivers.

“At the Caimanes bridge, the iron level was 50 percent higher than the limit and the manganese sample was nearly double the level permitted for drinking water,” Tchernitchin told Tierramérica.

He returned to take more samples for a second study, in February 2012. In a small pond, a few centimetres above a swamp, he found levels of manganese far above the internationally accepted limit.

“The limit is 100 micrograms of manganese per litre, and we found 9,477 micrograms. The iron level was also 30 percent above the limit,” he said.

He warned that if this severe level of pollution continued, the effects on the health of the local population would be serious. “Long-term exposure to manganese can cause diseases of the central nervous system such as psychosis, Parkinson’s disease and dementia,” Tchernitchin said.

On Mar. 6, a local court accepted a lawsuit brought by the Caimanes Defence Committee on Dec. 19, 2008 and ordered the tailings pond to be removed.

The mining company appealed, and the regional Appeals Court is to hand down a ruling shortly.

Jurgens and Gómez called for a law on tailings that would indicate how many impoundments exist in the country, how many have been abandoned, and what chemicals they contain.

“A strict law is needed, on one hand, and informed citizens on the other. We have neither of these,” Gómez argued.

“It is really paradoxical that we consider ourselves a mining country and always talk about how much copper we’re going to export, but no one is aware of the amount of waste we’re going to produce,” he said.

“We have to learn how to assess the negative aspects of mining and to raise awareness of that and of the large number of tailings ponds and waste that is literally dumped throughout the country,” he said.

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Coal mining in India. Coal-fired plants contribute 60 percent of India’s energy capacity and are a large source of the air pollution that is taking a toll on people’s health and their livelihoods. Photo credit: The Hindu

By Chaitanya Kumar
NEW DELHI, Mar 19 2015 (IPS)

In November last year, India’s power minister Piyush Goyal announced that he plans to double coal production in India by the end of this decade and, in an effort to enhance production, the Indian government has started a process of auctioning coal blocks.

Coupled with the auctions is the disinvestment of Coal India Limited (CIL), the world’s largest coal mining company, and both actions can provide short-term reprieve to India’s energy and fiscal deficit woes.

However, there are four reasons why investors and the government should be wary of investing in coal for the long run (10-15 years).

The first stems from the fact that it is rapidly becoming clear to big business and governments around the world that a large proportion of coal and other fossil fuels should be left in the ground. The second is that coal consumption is declining in many parts of the world, with economics increasingly in favour of alternate sources of energy, such as wind and solar.“A systematic effort is now under way to dilute environmental, land and forest laws … The latest land ordinance passed by the [Indian] government has done away with two key pillars of the process of land acquisition: social impact assessment and community consent”

Reasons three and four have to do with growing resistance from tribal and grassroots communities, and the fact that India will be forced to take some form of action as air pollution becomes increasingly dangerous.

Despite its plans for coal production, the Indian government has been giving the right indicators on its pursuit of renewable energy, but this ambition – though welcome – is being counterbalanced by the country’s continued lust for more coal.

Call it an addiction that is hard to let go or sustained pressure from big corporations and their existing investments in coal, the Indian government has turned its eye on the vast domestic reserves in the country.

Growing resistance from tribal and grassroots communities

A systematic effort is now under way to dilute environmental, land and forest laws in the country. The latest land ordinance passed by the government has done away with two key pillars of the process of land acquisition: social impact assessment and community consent. The ordinance is facing stiff resistance from opposition parties and the general masses of India.

Any project, either private or under a public private partnership (PPP), previously required the consent of 80 percent of the community that the project impacted but no such consent is now required.

Social impact assessments that factors in effects on the environment and human health, among others, were mandatory for projects and while such assessments were shoddy in the past, doing away with them completely sets a poor precedent for industrial practices and gives even less of a reason for companies to clean up their acts.

A lack of social impact assessment also adds to the ambiguity that exists in offering the right compensation as part of the rehabilitation and resettlement plan embedded in the land ordinance.

In the context of coal, the efforts of the government to re-allocate 204 coal blocks and begin mining will be met by stiff resistance from impacted communities. “There is a fear that we will witness greater state violence on people as they begin resisting projects that have immediate impacts on their lives and livelihoods”, says Sreedhar, a former geologist who now runs a network of activists called Mines, Minerals & People.

The Mahan coal block, forcefully pursued by the Essar company, is a case in point where local communities have been resisting open cast mining for several years. The mine is located in what is one of the last remaining tracts of dense forests in central India. Mahan has subsequently been withdrawn from the auctions, a victory celebrated by the local communities.

Foreign investors are especially wary of pumping money into projects that can see resistance from local communities. The high profile cases bauxite mining plans by British resources giant Vedanta in ‘sacred’ hills in eastern India and the plans of South Korea’s POSCO steel-making multinational to open a plant in the eastern state of Odisha have become strong deterrents for big money to enter India.

While the government’s efforts at allaying fears may work, there is a difference in rhetoric and on-the-ground reality because it will not be easy to simply wish away people’s concerns.

Visible resistance has taken shape in the state of Chhattisgarh where twenty tribal gram sabhas in the Hasdeo Arand coal field area of the state passed a formal resolution under the forest rights act against coal mining in their traditional forest land.

“There has to be an assessment of India’s energy needs alongside an evaluation of the forests that we stand to lose from coal mining. Allocation of coal blocks in dense forests is imprudent,” says Alok Shukla, an activist from Chhattisgarh who is mobilising tribal communities to uphold their forest rights.

These struggles might only intensify as government efforts are aggressively under way to further dilute tribal rights and open up inviolate forests for coal mining.

Air pollution is becoming hazardous and India will be forced to act

As the pressure to act on air pollution builds, India will have to enforce strict emission norms on coal plants and their operators. Installing flue-gas desulphurisation scrubbers should be mandatory on any new plant that is set to operate in coming years. These devices are very effective in limiting dangerous pollutants from escaping into the atmosphere but come at a heavy cost for investors and coal power generators. 

But why would the government work towards increasing operational costs for power plants in the pipeline? Here’s why – air pollution is killing Indians every year and is now the fifth largest contributor of deaths in the country. The fact that 13 of the world’s 20 most polluted cities are in India is a cause for great alarm. A study has indicated that one in three children have shown a reduction in lung function in Delhi.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) report, which makes this claim, advises that fine particles of less than 2.5 micrometres in diameter (PM2.5) should not exceed 10 micrograms per cubic metre. Delhi tops the list at 153 micrograms of PM2.5 per cubic metre and it is only getting worse.

In Delhi, for instance, coal roughly contributes 30 percent of recorded air pollution (particulate matter) and the numbers are higher in the coal clusters of the country. Coal-fired plants contribute 60 percent of India’s energy capacity and are a large source of the air pollution that is taking a toll on people’s health and their livelihoods.

A recent report on coal pollution in India by Urban Emissions and Conservation Action Trust reveals a shocking statistic – in another 15 years between 186,500 and 229,500 people may die premature deaths annually as a result of a spike in air pollution caused by coal-fired power plants.

In dealing with air pollution, curbing the effects of harmful pollutants like nitrous and sulphur oxides from coal power plants is critical and there is growing pressure on the central government to introduce strict emission standards. India is the only major coal-powered nation that does not have any concentration standards for these pollutants, a requirement that should soon be in place.

Both domestic and international pressure can move India to clean up its air. The government cannot afford to have an ‘airpocalypse’ on its hands.

All is not well with the coal industry in India  

Undaunted, Narendra Taneja, energy cell convenor of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, has claimed that coal and gas will remain the mainstay of the country’s economy for the next 50-60 years.

The impossibility of this claim becomes apparent when we look at the actual reserves of extractable coal. Only one-fifth of the coal reserves of CIL are extractable and if the ambitious doubling of domestic production happens, the known reserves are expected to last for less than two decades.

Coal mines that expire before the lifetime of new coal plants scream for greater economic prudence from investors.

India’s ambitious renewable energy expansion plans need to be complemented by a phase-out plan of coal. The world needs stronger political leadership from India as it tries to tackle the twin challenges of poverty and climate change.

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

Children exposed to mining industry pollution in Peru. The debate on mining is raging throughout Latin America. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

By Leila Lemghalef
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 30 2015 (IPS)

A recent case study on Canadian mining abuses in Latin America has woven one more thread of justice into the tapestry of international law.

The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal (PPT) has found five Canadian mining companies and the Canadian government responsible for human rights violations in Latin America, including labour rights violations, environmental destruction, the denial of indigenous self-determination rights, criminalisation of dissent and targeted assassinations."The battle for international justice is absolutely the same as the battle for internal democracy." -- Judge Gianni Tognoni

Gianni Tognoni was one of eight judges in the decision, and has been secretary general of the PPT since its inception in 1979.

In an interview with IPS, he spoke about how the PPT’s claims have previously become part of the international debate.

“And in the experience of the Tribunal, that has been happening in different ways,” he said.

Out of many examples, he cited the case of child slave labour in the apparel industry, which was denounced by the tribunal, and which was “taken up in order to strengthen the controls and the monitoring by NGOs of the conditions that were there”.

The big panorama, he said, shows that “whatever could be done is being done… in order to integrate the tribunal with other forces… in order to formulate in juridically solid terms the claims”.

International processes are rarely rapid, he said, articulating that the judgement on the former Yugoslavia would “appear to be more a kind of judgement on the memory, the same is true for Rwanda”.

He contrasted that to the immediate effectiveness of economic treaties, and also brought up the well-known clash between human rights and transnational corporations, and the latter’s attitude of impunity.

“It’s not possible to have a global society which is progressively responding only to the economic criteria and the economic indicator,” he summed up.

Formally, Canada is expected to uphold the same rights abroad as at home, in accordance with the Maastricht Principle under which public powers are supposed to monitor non-state actors.

“But they simply fail to do that,” Tognoni said.

The 86-page ruling reports that 75 per cent of mining companies worldwide are based in Canada, and that Canadian companies with estimated investments of over 50 billion dollars in Latin America’s mining sector represent 50-70 per cent of mining activities in that region.

“And the verdict in Canada is clearly showing Canada outside is favouring the violation of fundamental human rights,” Tognoni said.

The PPT on the session on Canadian mining delivered the guilty verdict in Montreal on Dec. 10, 2014 – Human Rights Day – in an ongoing investigation until 2016.

So far, it has made recommendations to the Canadian government, the mining companies in question, as well as international agencies and bodies including 22 divisions of the U.N. Human Rights Council.

Access to justice is a long-term effort

The PPT’s efforts are long-term ones.

“It is clear that it is important to organize the movement of opposition in order to give a strong also juridical support to the political and social arguments so that it would be clear that the battle for international justice is absolutely the same as the battle for internal democracy. Because the two things are more and more linked.  There are no more countries which are independent from the international scene,” Tognoni said.

PPT sessions “serve to add to that body of work to demonstrate that there is a crying need for instruments that will provide access to justice”, co-organiser of the PPT session on Canadian Mining in Latin America, Daniel Cayley-Daoust, told IPS.

“The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal is not an enforcement kind of initiative, where it does not having legal standing in a concrete way,” he said, explaining that it serves to support for affected communities and to document abuses committed, “in the sense of broadening that debate… to increase the pressure and to add that as kind of further proof to what the abuses are, that are permitted.”

A priority of the PPT is to add “more voice and credibility to something that has been largely ignored by the people who kind of have the power to make the changes”, said Cayley-Daoust.

In 2011, the U.N. Human Rights Council established a Working Group on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises.

Cayley-Daoust expressed concern that the U.N. has come under corporate influence over the last three to four decades, specifically because of its closer relations with corporations.

Rolando Gómez, spokesperson for the U.N. Human Rights Council, told IPS corporations are not immunised.

“There’s not one human rights issue within any setting – a corporation, a city, a country, a community – that would escape the attention of the council,” he said.

“We have seen positive trends of corporations, large and small, taking those issues to heart,” he said.

As for the challenge of political effects – “I think what we’ve been seeing is states are recognising more and more that we have to depoliticise the discussions,” he told IPS.

He emphasised that “the Human Rights Council is not merely about the resolutions adopted, but it’s about the follow-up, the action, it’s about the fact that there’s a setting here in Geneva where issues which often don’t get heard are heard.”

“The extent to which NGOs are active here is unique,” he told IPS, mentioning the participation of human rights victims and civil society, in delivering statements, sitting in on negotiations, and informing discussion going on in the formal setting.

As for whether talk translates into action… that depends on the issue as well as the willingness of states and decision-makers on the ground, said Gómez.

“Justice takes a long time,” he said.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The road to Baradares in north central Haiti. The aim of the new draft mining law appears to be a massive expansion of Haiti’s mining sector. Credit: Lee Cohen/cc by 2.0

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Jan 13 2015 (IPS)

With Haiti’s Parliament having dissolved on Tuesday, civil society groups are worried that the Haitian president may move to unilaterally put in place a contentious revision to the country’s decades-old mining law.

Starting in 2013, that draft was written with technical assistance from the World Bank. Last week, a half-dozen Haitian groups filed a formal appeal with the bank’s complaints office, expressing concern that the legislation had been crafted without the public consultation often required under the Washington-based development funder’s own policies.“The process has been very opaque, with a small group of experts from the World Bank and Haitian government officials drafting this law.” -- Sarah Singh

The aim of the new draft mining law appears to be a massive expansion of Haiti’s mining sector, paving the way for the entry of foreign companies already interested in the country’s significant gold and other deposits.

“Community leaders … are encouraging communities to think critically about ‘development’, and to not simply accept projects defined by outsiders,” Ellie Happel, an attorney in Port-au-Prince who has been involved in the complaint, told IPS.

“These projects often fail. And, in the case with gold mining, residents learn that these projects may threaten their very way of life.”

Haiti’s extractives permitting process is currently extensive and bureaucratic. Yet the new revisions would bypass parliamentary oversight altogether, halting even a requirement that agreement terms be made public, according to a draft leaked in July.

Critics worry that this streamlining, coupled with the Haitian government’s weakness in ensuring oversight, could result in social and environmental problems, particularly damaging to a largely agrarian economy. Further, there is question as to whether exploitation of this lucrative minerals wealth would benefit the country’s vast impoverished population.

“The World Bank’s involvement in developing the Draft Mining Law lends the law credibility, which is likely to encourage investment in the Haitian mining sector,” the complaint, filed with the bank’s Inspection Panel on Wednesday, states.

“[T]his increased investment in the mining sector will result in … contamination of vital waterways, impacts on the agriculture sector, and involuntary displacement of communities. Complainants are also concerned about the exclusion of Haitian people from the law reform process, particularly when contrasted with the reported regular participation of the private sector in drafting the new law.”

An opaque process

The complaint comes five years after a devastating earthquake struck Haiti, and as political instability is threatening reconstruction and development progress made in that catastrophe’s aftermath. Elections have been repeatedly put off for more than two years, and by Tuesday so many members of Parliament are slated to have finished their terms that the body would lack a quorum.

On Sunday Haitian President Michel Martelly indicated that a deal might be near. But the leftist opposition was reportedly not part of this agreement, and has repeatedly warned that the president is planning to rule by decree.

The Inspection Panel complaint, filed by six civil society groups operating under the umbrella Kolektif Jistis Min (the Justice in Mining Collective), contextualises its concerns against this backdrop of instability. “[T]he Haitian government may be poised to adopt the Draft Mining Law by decree, outside the democratic process,” it states.

Even if the political crisis is dealt with soon, concerns with the legislation’s drafting process will remain.

The Justice in Mining Collective, which represents around 50,000 Haitians, drew up the complaint after the draft mining law was leaked in July. No formal copy of the legislation has been made public, nor has the French-language draft law been translated into Haitian Creole, the most commonly spoken language.

“The process has been very opaque, with a small group of experts from the World Bank and Haitian government officials drafting this law,” Sarah Singh, the director of strategic support with Accountability Counsel, a legal advocacy group that consulted on the complaint and is representing some Haitian communities, told IPS.

“They’ve had two meetings that, to my knowledge, were invite-only and held in French, at which the majority of attendees were private investors and some big NGOs. Yet the bank’s response to complaints of this lack of consultation has been to say this is the government’s responsibility.”

The Justice in Mining Collective is suggesting that this lack of consultation runs counter to social and environmental guidelines that undergird all World Bank investments. These policies would also call for a broad environmental assessment across the sector, something local civil society is now demanding – to be followed by a major public debate around the assessment’s findings and the potential role large-scale mining could play in Haiti’s development.

Yet the World Bank is not actually investing in the Haitian mining sector, and it is not clear that the institution’s technical assistance is required to conform to the safeguards policies. In a November letter, the bank noted that its engagement on the Haitian mining law has been confined to sharing international best practices.

Yet Singh says she and others believe the safeguards do still apply, particularly given the scope of the new legislation’s impact.

“This will change the entire legal regime,” she says. “The idea that bank could do that and not have the safeguards apply seems hugely problematic.”

A World Bank spokesperson did confirm to IPS that the Inspection Panel has received the Haitian complaint. If the panel registers the request, she said, the bank’s management would have around a month to submit a response, following which the bank’s board would decide whether the complaint should be investigated.

Parliamentary moratorium

Certainly sensitivities around the Haitian extractives sector have increased in recent years.

Minerals prospecting in Haiti has expanded significantly over the past half-decade, though no company has yet moved beyond exploration. In 2012, when the government approved its first full mining permit in years, the Parliament balked, issuing a non-binding moratorium on all extraction until a sector-wide assessment could take place.

Meanwhile, Haitians have been looking across the border at some of the mining-related problems experienced in the Dominican Republic, including water pollution. Civil society groups have also been reaching out to other countries in the Global South, trying to understand the experiences of other communities around large-scale extractives operations.

Current views are also being informed by decades of historical experience in Haiti, as well. Since the country’s independence in the early 19th century, several foreign companies have engaged many years of gold mining.

That was a “negative, even catastrophic, experience,” according to a statement from the Justice in Mining Collective released following the leak of the draft mining law in July.

“Mining exploitation has never contributed to the development of Haiti. To the contrary, the history of gold exploitation is one marked by blood and suffering since the beginning,” the statement warned.

“When we consider the importance of and the potential consequences of mineral exploitation, we note this change in the law as a sort of scandal that may facilitate further looting, without even the people aware of the consequences.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be reached at cbiron@ips.org

Children playing in mining tailings in Morococha, Peru. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Nov 6 2014 (IPS)

The world’s largest corporations continue to publicise scant information about their global operations, according to new analysis that warns that extractives companies in particular are unprepared for pending disclosure requirements.

The findings come from the global watchdog Transparency International, which looked at 124 of the world’s largest companies. Using publicly available information, the researchers ranked each corporation based on three concerns: anti-corruption measures, transparency around global operations and subsidiaries, and disclosure of country-by-country and project-level finances.“Industry resistance to this kind of regulation has been pretty strong, so it’s not surprising that companies aren’t voluntarily disclosing this information and instead waiting until they’re forced to do so.” -- Alexandra Gillies

While the level of anti-corruption activities is relatively high and growing, the current state of the latter two metrics is far weaker. Indeed, the average score for country-by-country reporting, seen as a transparency lynchpin, is a dismal six percent – and 50 companies have scored zero.

In introducing the study on Wednesday, Transparency International’s chair, Jose Ugaz, noted that the power of multinational companies in today’s global economy rivals even the biggest countries.

“With greater economic power comes greater responsibility,” he said. “Bad corporate behaviour creates the corruption that causes poverty and instability.”

In general, British companies fare best in the new index, Chinese and Asian companies more broadly fare worst, and the U.S. technology sector receives special criticism for its lack of transparency. Transparency International has been reporting on corporate governance since 2008, with the last such study being released in 2012.

The weak results for country-by-country reporting, in particular, will worry anti-poverty advocates and proponents of public sector spending. Such disclosure would, for instance, allow governments to efficiently compare crossborder information with the aim of cutting down on tax evasion as well as outright theft of revenues.

Developing countries may have lost an estimated six trillion dollars in the decade before 2011 due to tax evasion and other shady financial dealings, according to the Washington watchdog group Global Financial Integrity.

“Domestic resource mobilisation is seen as key to unlock economic development,” Koen Roovers, the E.U. advisor for the Financial Transparency Coalition, a global network that funded the new Transparency International report, told IPS.

“Publicly available [country-by-country reporting] information would enable citizens of developing nations to determine whether the taxes paid by the transnational companies that trade in their countries is in line with their activities. The apparent absence of this information gives reason for suspicion.”

Industry resistance

With the aim of ensuring that lucrative natural resources-related revenues are safeguarded in developing countries, the global extractives industry has been a special focus for disclosure requirements.

The United States, European Union and Canada in recent years have all passed project-by-project disclosure requirements, mandating reporting on all payments made by extractives companies to foreign governments.

And while the U.S. legislation is currently held up in court due to a lawsuit brought by the oil industry, the E.U.’s requirements are set to go into effect by the middle of next year. Canada’s new rules could be implemented even sooner.

Yet Transparency International warns that extractives companies are “not ready” to comply with these new rules.

“Even though country-by-country reporting was first introduced in the extractive sector, the 19 oil and gas companies in the study only scored an average of 10 per cent,” the report states. “Six companies in this industry scored zero.”

Not all of these companies did poorly on country-by-country reporting. For instance, the Norwegian oil company Statoil scored highest of all of the 124 companies on this metric, with a score of 66 percent.

Other strong performers included the Indian companies Oil & Natural Gas Corporation and Reliance, as well as the Australian-headquartered BHP Billiton, by certain calculations the world’s largest mining company.

Yet overall the sector still appears to be biding its time until the new requirements in the U.S., E.U. and Canada go into effect. For supporters of stricter disclosure, the findings underscore just how transformative those new legal regimes will be.

“Industry resistance to this kind of regulation has been pretty strong, so it’s not surprising that companies aren’t voluntarily disclosing this information and instead waiting until they’re forced to do so,” Alexandra Gillies, the head of governance at the Natural Resources Governance Institute (NRGI), a think tank, told IPS.

“While there are a few smaller companies that have taken this step, the big players certainly haven’t. Nonetheless, it will be interesting to see how the same data looks in another two years.”

Indeed, the U.S. and E.U. disclosure requirements alone would cover an estimated 65 percent of the global extractives sector in terms of value, according to Publish What You Pay, a global advocacy group. And the new Canadian rules, formally tabled late last month with the aim of implementation by April, would likewise affect the world’s largest national mining industry.

Further, at a summit next week, the Group of 20 (G20) industrialised countries are expected to approve a new country-by-country reporting standard that would cover all multinational companies. The Financial Transparency Coalition’s Roovers says the new findings from Transparency International will “up the ante” for the G20 discussions.

Still, he notes that, as currently envisioned, the G20 reports would likely not be made public due to concerns over commercial “sensitivities”.

On to contracts

For many advocates, non-public disclosure would defeat an important purpose of stricter transparency requirements: empowering citizens and civil society to engage in local-level oversight.

“The real innovation around project-level data is that citizens or journalists or parliamentarians would be able to understand the deals that their government has entered into. Right now all we have are highly aggregated figures,” NRGI’s Gillies says.

“If someone is dealing with, say, a huge mine in their community, that data can help them to understand how much money the government is collecting for that project – and whether the disruption they’re facing is worthwhile.”

Nonetheless, with country-by-country reporting requirements now on the horizon, Gillies and others are already turning their attention to a corollary data set: contract-level disclosure. Indeed, certain countries – including Liberia, Guinea, the Democratic Republic of Congo and others – as well as some companies are already making all information on contracts related to natural resource extraction publicly available.

“If you have good revenue or payment data, it’s still difficult to understand what those figures mean unless you know what agreements have been signed,” Gillies says.

“But contract disclosure is already becoming more widely accepted, with a few countries and companies taking the lead. It hasn’t yet become standard practice and what is being done remains piecemeal, but it’s enough to show that this activity isn’t commercially dangerous.”

Within a few years, advocates hope to see the disclosure of both payments and agreements signed with foreign governments become standard procedure.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be reached at cbiron@ips.org

The Canadian government is failing either to investigate or to hold the country’s massive extractives sector accountable for rights abuses committed in Latin American countries, according to petitioners who testified here Tuesday before an international tribunal.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) also heard concerns that the Canadian government is not making the country’s legal system available to victims of these abuses.“Far too often, extractive companies have double-standards in how they behave at home versus abroad.” -- Alex Blair of Oxfam America

“Canada has been committed to a voluntary framework of corporate social responsibility, but this does not provide any remedy for people who have been harmed by Canadian mining operations,” Jen Moore, the coordinator of the Latin America programme at MiningWatch Canada, a watchdog group, told IPS.

“We’re looking for access to the courts but also for the Canadian state to take preventive measures to avoid these problems in the first place – for instance, an independent office that would have the power to investigate allegations of abuse in other countries.”

Moore and others who testified before the commission formally submitted a report detailing the concerns of almost 30 NGOs. Civil society groups have been pushing the Canadian government to ensure greater accountability for this activity for years, Moore says, and that work has been buttressed by similar recommendations from both a parliamentary commission, in 2005, and the United Nations.

“Nothing new has taken place over the past decade … The Canadian government has refused to implement the recommendations,” Moore says.

“The state’s response to date has been to firmly reinforce this voluntary framework that doesn’t work – and that’s what we heard from them again during this hearing. There was no substantial response to the fact that there are all sorts of cases falling through the cracks.”

Canada, which has one of the largest mining sectors in the world, is estimated to have some 1,500 projects in Latin America – more than 40 percent of the mining companies operating in the region. According to the new report, and these overseas operations receive “a high degree” of active support from the Canadian government.

“We’re aware of a great deal of conflict,” Shin Imai, a lawyer with the Justice and Corporate Accountability Project, a Canadian civil society initiative, said Tuesday. “Our preliminary count shows that at least 50 people have been killed and some 300 wounded in connection with mining conflicts involving Canadian companies in recent years, for which there has been little to no accountability.”

These allegations include deaths, injuries, rapes and other abuses attributed to security personnel working for Canadian mining companies. They also include policy-related problems related to long-term environmental damage, illegal community displacement and subverting democratic processes.

Home state accountability

The Washington-based IACHR, a part of the 35-member Organisation of American States (OAS), is one of the world’s oldest multilateral rights bodies, and has looked at concerns around Canadian mining in Latin America before.

Yet this week’s hearing marked the first time the commission has waded into the highly contentious issue of “home state” accountability – that is, whether companies can be prosecuted at home for their actions abroad.

“This hearing was cutting-edge. Although the IACHR has been one of the most important allies of human rights violations’ victims in Latin America, it’s a little bit prudent when it faces new topics or new legal challenges,” Katya Salazar, executive director of the Due Process of Law Foundation, a Washington-based legal advocacy group, told IPS.

“And talking about the responsibility for the home country of corporations working in Latin America is a very new challenge. So we’re very happy to see how the commission’s understanding and concern about these topics have evolved.”
Home state accountability has become progressively more vexed as industries and supply chains have quickly globalised. Today, companies based in rich countries, with relatively stronger legal systems, are increasingly operating in developing countries, often under weaker regulatory regimes.

The extractives sector has been a key example of this, and over the past two decades it has experienced one of the highest levels of conflict with local communities of any industry. For advocates, part of the problem is a current vagueness around the issue of the “extraterritorial” reach of domestic law.

“Far too often, extractive companies have double-standards in how they behave at home versus abroad,” Alex Blair, a press officer with the extractives programme at Oxfam America, a humanitarian and advocacy group, told IPS. “They think they can take advantage of weaknesses in local laws, oversight and institutions to operate however they want in developing countries.”

Blair notes a growing trend of local and indigenous communities going abroad to hold foreign companies accountable. Yet these efforts remain extraordinarily complex and costly, even as legal avenues in many Western countries continue to be constricted.

Transcending the legalistic

At this week’s hearing, the Canadian government maintained that it was on firm legal ground, stating that it has “one of the world’s strongest legal and regulatory frameworks towards its extractives industries”.

In 2009, Canada formulated a voluntary corporate responsibility strategy for the country’s international extractives sector. The country also has two non-judicial mechanisms that can hear grievances arising from overseas extractives projects, though neither of these can investigate allegations, issue rulings or impose punitive measures.

These actions notwithstanding, the Canadian response to the petitioners concerns was to argue that local grievances should be heard in local court and that, in most cases, Canada is not legally obligated to pursue accountability for companies’ activities overseas.

“With respect to these corporations’ activities outside Canada, the fact of their incorporation within Canada is clearly not a sufficient connection to Canada to engage Canada’s obligations under the American Declaration,” Dana Cryderman, Canada’s alternate permanent representative to the OAS, told the commission, referring to the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, the document that underpins the IACHR’s work.

Cryderman continued: “[H]ost countries in Latin America offer domestic legal and regulatory avenues through which the claims being referenced by the requesters can and should be addressed.”

Yet this rationale clearly frustrated some of the IACHR’s commissioners, including the body’s current president, Rose-Marie Antoine.

“Despite the assurances of Canada there’s good policy, we at the commission continue to see a number of very, very serious human rights violations occurring in the region as a result of certain countries, and Canada being one of the main ones … so we’re seeing the deficiencies of those policies,” Antoine said following the Canadian delegation’s presentation.

“On the one hand, Canada says, ‘Yes, we are responsible and wish to promote human rights.’ But on the other hand, it’s a hands-off approach … We have to move beyond the legalistic if we’re really concerned about human rights.”

Antoine noted the commission was currently working on a report on the impact of natural resources extraction on indigenous communities. She announced, for the first time, that the report would include a chapter on what she referred to as the “very ticklish issue of extraterritoriality”.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be reached at cbiron@ips.org

Survivors of the May 2014 Soma mine disaster, the worst in Turkey's history which left more than 300 people dead. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

By Tessa Love
ISTANBUL, Oct 26 2014 (IPS)

Six days a week, Tahir Cetin spends seven and a half hours hundreds of feet underground on a narrow ledge, mining coal near Soma, Turkey. He breathes in dust that is destroying his lungs, and digs into walls that could collapse on top of him. With one false step, he could fall to his death.

After five years of these conditions, and the low quality of life he faces due to little pay and poor treatment, the father of three says with resignation that it does not matter if he is alive or dead.

“It is slavery,” says Cetin, who lost his nephew in May this year, when an explosion at the Soma coal mine in Manisa in western Turkeycaused an underground  fire, killing more than 300 people in the worst mine disaster in the country’s history. “As workers, we are valuable, but we are despised and mistreated by our country.”“The reason these people died [in the Soma mine disaster of May 2014] is because of the government’s neoliberal policies of subcontracting and making profits. The people really responsible are those in the government who allow privatisation” – Arzu Cerkezoglu, Secretary-General of DISK

According to Hurriyet Demirhan, a board member of the Chamber of Mining Engineers, nearly every miner in Turkey works under such conditions, which are chronic and widespread, and many wonder if or when another Soma disaster will repeat itself.

Both Demirhan and Arzu Cerkezoglu, Secretary-General of the Confederation of Revolutionary Trade Unions of Turkey (DISK), the union that now represents the Soma workers, believe that this will inevitably happen in one or more of the 450 mines facing exactly the same threat as Soma unless drastic changes are made.

DISK, as well as the Chamber of Mining Engineers, has filed reports about all of them, warning the government of their lack of safety. In 2010, Demirhan even filed a report on Soma, listing it as the most dangerous, but no changes were introduced.

While a fire that knocked out power at the mine and shut down ventilation shafts and elevators caused the Soma disaster, Cerkezoglu blames the government for the accident, and she points her finger at privatisation as the biggest problem with Turkey’s mining sector.

“The reason these people died is because of the government’s neoliberal policies of subcontracting and making profits,” she argues. “The people really responsible are those in the government who allow privatisation.”

Privatisation of Turkey’s mines began in the 1980s, when there was widespread agreement that the state was incapable of running mines efficiently. Now, private companies apply for permits through the Ministry of Energy and when they are approved, they hire auditors, engineers and safety personnel, all of whom are supposed to ensure the safety of the mines and fair treatment of the workers.

However, according to Demirhan, because it is the company that hires these personnel, they do little when they find something amiss. Add to this a mentality of high production at low cost, and the result is extremely poor conditions and abysmal pay.

It is through this process, says Demirhan, that workers lose their rights – and death is the consequence. “All of this is the responsibility of the state,” he adds, “and it is only through policies written by the state that workers can regain their rights.”

Immediately after the Soma disaster, DISK began working directly with mine workers and the families of the deceased to compile a file listing their demands for Soma and mining safety in general, which they presented to the Ministry of Energy in early July.

These demands include greater job security, higher pay, shorter and fewer shifts, an earlier retirement age, and compensation for the families of workers who died in the disaster, including new homes, double salaries, and forgiven debts, according to Tayfun Gorgun of DISK.

Gorgun is currently stationed in Soma and is working with the state to ensure that these demands are met for the 8000 workers still mining in the Soma area. But while the government has made promises to meet these demands, he says, progress has been slow.

The biggest promise the government has made so far has been to do away with subcontracting in the mining sector, which would stop many of the problems caused by privatisation. However, this issue, along with several others, has not even made it into the draft legislation phase.

According to Gorgun, “the government’s strategy is to decrease rights by letting time pass until people forget. The only way to make these changes happen is for the public to continue to care.”

Demirhan agrees, saying: “The state knows we will forget. We have forgotten before, and we will again.”

Cerkezoglu is confident that change will come, saying she believes that “the resistance of workers will lead to a change of living conditions and collective work agreements.”

For his part, Cetin wryly acknowledges that workers have been displaying this resistance. “We have asked for our rights, we’ve gone on strike and we’ve marched,” he says, but then he describes the violence that workers have faced for their efforts, including being beaten with batons and gassed by riot police.

“We have always known the taste of dynamite dust in our lungs, but we had never known the taste of pepper gas. Thanks to the state, we now know that as well.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Children playing next to mine tailings in Morococha, a mining town in the central Peruvian department or region of Junín. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

By Milagros Salazar
LIMA, Aug 14 2014 (IPS)

The leading mining companies in Peru have brought a rash of lawsuits to fight an increase in the tax they pay to cover the costs of inspections and oversight of their potentially environmentally damaging activities.

The lawsuits have come one after another. As of Aug. 7, 14 mining companies had filed legal injunctions in different courts to fight the “Aporte por Regulación” (APR – Regulation Contribution) that they are charged, Environment Minister Manuel Pulgar-Vidal told IPS.

The legal action targets different institutions in the executive branch, including the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, the Ministry of Economy and Finance, the Ministry of Environment, the Ministry of Energy and Mines, and OEFA, Peru’s environmental oversight agency, which collects the APR.

Javier Velarde, the general manager of the Yanacocha mining company, told IPS that a total of 26 mining corporations, including his firm – the largest gold producer in Latin America – have brought legal action against the APR.

Yanacocha is a joint venture owned by the U.S.-based Newmont Mining Corporation and the Peruvian company Buenaventura.

The National Society of Mining, Oil and Energy, which represents the leading companies in the industry, also brought action against the APR, arguing that it is unconstitutional.

At the same time, four companies opened administrative proceedings with the Commission for the Elimination of Bureaucratic Barriers of the National Institute for Defence of Competition and Protection of Intellectual Property (INDECOPI).

The companies argue that the APR amounts to a “confiscation”.

One of the companies that turned to INDECOPI is the Peruvian firm Caudalosa, which in 2010 caused a major spill of toxic waste from a tailings dam, poisoning the rivers that provide water to the people of Huancavelica in central Peru, one of the poorest departments (regions) in the country.

The corporations that have brought court action include foreign firms like Cerro Verde, a subsidiary of the U.S.-based Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc, and two subsidiaries of the Anglo-Swiss multinational Glencore Xstrata.

The Peruvian companies include Casapalca, which is facing several lawsuits for environmental, labour and safety violations, and Volcan, which has been fined on a number of occasions for causing environmental damage.

“Companies are getting bolder and bolder,” in a political context where efforts are being made to reduce “bureaucratic hurdles” to investment, Deputy Minister of Environmental Management José de Echave told IPS.

Delia Morales, left, and Sandra Rossi, officials at OEFA, Peru’s environmental oversight agency, reviewing the legal injunctions presented by mining companies. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

In July, Congress approved a package of measures introduced by the government of President Ollanta Humala to boost private sector investment by simplifying environmental requirements and streamlining bureaucratic procedures, due to the slowdown in the economy triggered by declining demand for raw materials.

Peru is the world’s fifth-largest producer of gold, second of silver, third of copper, zinc and tin, and fourth of lead. Mining accounts for nine percent of the country’s GDP, 60 percent of exports, 21 percent of private investment and 30 percent of income tax. It also provides mining companies with billions of dollars in profits.

“We are defending ourselves and we are sure that we will demonstrate that the measure has sound legal standing,” Minister Pulgar-Vidal told IPS, after confirming that the judiciary had already thrown out one of the lawsuits, filed by Antapaccay, a subsidiary of Glencore Xstrata.

The inspection tax was originally created in 2000 to finance the regulatory agencies. It was established at the time that the contribution would not exceed one percent of a company’s annual earnings after taxes, OEFA officials explained.

But in December, the government decreed that the contribution would be reduced to 0.15 percent of annual sales in 2014 and 2015, and to 0.13 percent in 2016.

The president of the OEFA board of directors, Hugo Gómez, said that if one percent was not a “confiscation” then a smaller contribution was even less so.

But Yanacocha’s Velarde argued that the decree that set the amount of the contribution was tacked onto the original law, which it distorted, because the amount “far exceeds the cost of activities of monitoring and oversight.”

At stake in this legal battle is not only money but also the Independence of environmental oversight activities.

Before OEFA took over the environmental monitoring of the mining industry in 2010, the task was in the hands of the Supervisory Body for Investment in Energy and Mining, which charged a “mining tariff”.

The tariff was calculated according to what the Supervisory Body specifically spent for each company inspected: days of work for the inspector, costs of lab testing of samples, and other expenses for services. The companies were billed directly for the cost of the inspections, OEFA director of supervision, Delia Morales, told IPS.

The tariff system was inherited by OEFA, but in December 2013, a percentage for the APR was set, which brought in more money.

From nearly 400,000 dollars, which the regulatory body took in with the mining tariff in 2013, the total went up to nine million dollars under the APR in the first half of this year alone.
OEFA estimates that it will bring in some 15 million dollars this year for oversight of the mining industry alone. Up to mid-2013, it had collected 17 million dollars for monitoring and inspection of three sectors: fossil fuels, mining and electricity.

IPS learned that in its court injunction against the APR, Xstrata Las Bambas, which also belongs to Glencore Xstrata, argued that with the new APR it ended up paying 36 times more than what it paid with the mining tariff.

OEFA official Sandra Rossi told IPS that technical calculations were made to set the amount of the APR because the way the mining tariff was determined “limited oversight.”

“It was an outdated system” that did not make it possible to carry out technical work and prevention efforts to inform communities of what impacts the extractive industry activities could have, Morales said.

The manager of Yanacocha said he did agree that mining companies should finance oversight activities. But he argued that they should be charged in relation to “the real costs” and should not have to finance other activities that are not directly related to monitoring and inspection.

But Iván Lanegra, a specialist in environmental policy questions and a former deputy minister of intercultural issues, told IPS that “environmental oversight is not limited to specific monitoring of a given company. It is broader than that. What was created was not an OEFA for each company, but an overall oversight and inspection structure.”

In his view, “It’s fair for the companies that receive significant benefits” to pay for the oversight, because they carry out activities that pose serious environmental risks. Lanegra said it would not be right for the expense to be financed with the taxes paid by all Peruvians.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes