We welcome the telephone calls that we have received over the past two weeks from three separate persons purporting to be speaking for Amerindian communities expressing the view that our recent reporting on the mining sector based on interviews with Acting Commissioner of the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission (GGMC) William Woolford and Executive Director of the Guyana Gold and Diamond Miners’ Association (GGDMA) Edward Shields may have created the impression that the sense of recklessness and irresponsibility that has frequently characterized some mining operations in the interior was a thing of the past. That, most decidedly, was not our intention.
Our reports sought to capture the assessments of the two officials regarding what they felt were incremental efforts to seek to remedy some of the environmental issues that plague the sector and many of which have been acknowledged by the Prime Minister himself.
We believe that there were some positive points made, first, by Mr. Woolford who outlined details of the GGMC’s public information campaign to sensitize the miners to the importance of environmental responsibility as well as the efforts of the GGMC’s field officers to police the mining communities as best they can with a view to enforcing the mining regulations. In this regard we noted that the GGMC was receiving some measure of external assistance in its pursuits and we believe that this too is a positive development.
That having been said we were certainly under no illusions that the GGMC’s public information campaign was making an impact on every miner in every mining community or that the GGMC has anywhere near the capacity to effectively police the sprawling mining communities. In fact, in this latter regard, we were of the distinct impression – and Mr. Woolford certainly did not seek to conceal this – that the policing of the mining communities was a work in progress that continues to be decidedly deficient though Mr. Woolford did point out that the GGMC continues to train officers with a view to strengthening capacity.
From Mr. Shields we gleaned, significantly, that the mining community was no longer ‘hung up’ on the use of mercury and was entirely prepared to embrace workable mercury-free mining methods and that the GGDMA itself had recruited two environmental officers who were working along with the GGMC’s functionaries to address the problems. Again, Mr. Shields in his customary blunt manner certainly did not seek to create the impression that conditions in the sector had changed overnight. In fact, he euphemistically remarked that the sector was “a complex one” and there was really no need for us to press him further to determine that what he appeared to be implying was that where there was gold there was likely to be ‘complications’ of one kind or another and that these could not be wished away at the drop of a hat. At the same time Mr. Shields made it clear that he believed, first, that the rights of the residents of interior communities, including the right to determine how their lands should be utilized, must be respected and that miners who were found to be in breach of mining regulations should face the full force of the law.
We are already aware of the strong and verifiable views that have been expressed by representatives of Amerindian communities and pressure groups regarding both the despoiling of their natural environment and the abuse of Amerindians including young women resident in those communities and it is hardly necessary to chronicle the various instances of disruptive and destructive recklessness in some mining communities that have been unearthed and brought to public attention.
We believe, however, that while it is absolutely necessary to continue to expose such indiscretions as occur in mining communities it is also important that we acknowledge such worthwhile steps as are taken to address the problems in the mining sector which are considerable in their magnitude and which, we are aware, cannot be solved overnight. The miners and their representatives, for example, have, up until recently, been decidedly touchy about the mercury issue and it has to be said that their changing stance on the issue has coincided roughly with international developments including the positions that have been taken by Europe and the United States on the export of mercury.
It is of course not sufficient to simply applaud an approach of gradualism in the quest for an end to the atrocities in the mining sector and in this regard we believe that progress in the direction of a complete transformation is still painfully slow. This, since those pockets of lawlessness in the sector that persist continue to directly affect the lives and livelihoods of some Amerindian communities and cannot be allowed to drift, awaiting the leisurely application of eventual solutions that, given their urban and bureaucratic character, will inevitably take ages to come. Efforts to deal with the more serious problems, particularly those that directly affect Amerindians, like the pollution of water, the digging and abandonment of pits and illegal mining on Amerindian lands and the abuse of residents of Amerindian communities, must be addressed as a matter of urgency and largely through self-regulation. If the miners can be made to recognize their responsibility to the host communities that is bound to be more effective than any solutions imposed from above since those are more than likely to be slow in coming and when they eventually do will probably come in the form of sanctions that are sporadic rather than sustainable.
We note too the recent allocation of more mining claims at some interior locations and wonder about the impact of this development on the further stretching of already thinly stretched policing resources.
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) is among those agencies that have acknowledged that mining as an economic activity is here to stay and that it behoves the sector to recognize that its responsibilities extend beyond simply taking the minerals out of the ground and also embraces the creation of an environment that acknowledges the reality of coexistence with Amerindian communities and with nature itself. In this context it is probably apt to wonder whether the current and diligent official advocacy of environmental awareness would not assume a far greater sense of seriousness if, in the same way that the Auditor General produces an audit of state expenditure for the National Assembly each year, an annual and independent environmental audit of the mining sector, perhaps paid for by the miners themselves, would not be an entirely worthwhile exercise since, apart from bringing to the fore the various forms of deviant behavior in the industry, such a study would be useful in the application of corrective measures, whatever those measures might be.
We would wish to assure those callers on behalf of the Indigenous community with whom we spoke that our reportage on developments at the GGMC and the GGDMA were not intended to create the impression that there does not still remain major and unresolved issues that have to do with mining and its impact on their communities and on the environment. We know different.
We know, for example, the high gold prices have led to sporadic and often downright reckless mining frenzies since greed is often inclined to hold sway over acting responsibly. We believe, therefore, that the state, through the GGDMA and the miners, working with their Association, have a duty to keep their end of the bargain. We will continue to be receptive both to efforts made by the authorities to address the problems in the mining sector as well as the legitimate concerns of the Amerindians and the country as a whole about the despoiling of the environment.