-Woolford
The Guyana Geology and Mines Commission (GGMC) says it is encouraged by the response that it is receiving from the mining community as a whole to efforts to improve the quality of environmental management in the mining sector.
“Given the fact that there are between 500 and 600 mining operations going at this time there has been substantial improvement in miners’ attitude to the environment. Collectively and individually there has been an improvement in the level of responsibility of the miners’ towards the environment. It is very clear that the miners are willing to respond, Acting Commissioner of the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission William Woolford told Stabroek Business recently.
“While we are aware that like in any other area there is room for improvement, we think that with the partnerships that we have struck, including our partnership with the miners themselves and the education awareness programme initiated by the GGMC, we have the opportunity to move forward,” Woolford added.
Woolford’s upbeat assessment of the miners’ response to the GGMC’s efforts to curb environmental delinquency in the mining sector comes amidst widespread claims by various pressure groups, including Amerindian rights groups that the Commission is ill-equipped to effectively monitor activities in the country’s far-flung mining locations and that the excesses of some miners are despoiling the environment and impacting negatively on Amerindian communities situated close to mining sites.
However, Woolford insists that the GGMC has been seeing positive results from what he says is a significantly intensified campaign to bring about behaviour change among the miners and to cause them to understand that the economic benefits of mining cannot be separated from ensuring the application of safe and environmentally sound mining practices.
”We have strengthened our capacity both in terms of the numbers of persons as well as the level of training within the GGMC. We have acquired and put into operation field equipment that is essential for the work to go forward and we have worked with the miners in terms of training in environmental management,” Woolford said.
According to Woolford the GGMC’s programme to bring about positive change in the mining sector is being supported by programmes with the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) through its GENCAPD programme and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). He said that the work of the Commission was also receiving the support of the Guyana Gold and Diamond Miners Association (GGDMA) which had hired two environmental officers to assist with the training of miners.
Woolford told Stabroek Business that the Commission had recruited fourteen rangers nominated by communities in the mining areas and had provided training for them. These, he said, help to perform an important monitoring function in mining communities. “What we have to keep doing is determining where we are in order to work out how we are going to move forward,” Woolford said.
Officers attached to the GGMC’s Mines Division are targeted to visit each one of country’s 500-odd known mining operations twice a year. However, according to Woolford, those visits can be more frequent once problems are identified in particular areas.
Meanwhile, according to Woolford, the GGMC is continuing to enforce the existing mining regulations in its ongoing efforts to seek to eradicate irresponsible and environmentally unsound mining practices in the industry. He said that the Commission had taken legal action in cases where violations had come to its attention and that in most cases its resort to the courts had been successful. Most of the cases have been prosecuted and, more often than not, what we have had have been out of court settlements in accordance with the mining regulations. There are also seven cases in which we have banned miners from operating in the sector for three to five years. Some of those bans are still in force,” Woolford added.
And according to Woolford, while the economic gains that derive from increasing the recovery of minerals in the sector were important, the Commission was placing a higher priority on ensuring sound and effective environmental management. “We begin from the position that miners want to be responsible and we want to help them to be responsible. At the same time we want to help them to raise the levels of their operations,” Woolford said. He disclosed that at its August conference the GGMC will be seeking to introduce miners to new equipment that could increase the rate of gold recovery from sluice boxes from current levels of around 25 per cent to between 70 and 90 per cent. “We believe that this will encourage them to improve their overall operations,” Woolford added.
