With few employment alternatives now available, families in several interior communities including the township of Port Kaituma have little alternative but to continue to hitch their sails to the mast of a gold mining industry that continues to be affected by the plummeting price on the world market.
During a visit to Port Kaituma last weekend this newspaper spoke with several residents, including businessmen, whose fortunes remain firmly tied to those of the mining sector but who, perhaps somewhat belatedly, are beginning to recognize that they are hostage to a situation over which they have no control.
Well-known Port Kaituma businessman Conrad St Romain believes that there could be a hard road ahead for Port Kaituma where, the arrival of Barama Company with its logging operations and the ‘gold fever’ driven by high prices had the effect of removing many residents of Kaituma and neighboring areas away from their traditional farming moorings. Now, with Barama gone and gold prices not what they used to be there can be no question of going back to the land for those who had begun to see mining as a road to a better life.
St Romain believes that the residents of Kaituma caught on to the realities of the gold mining industry “much too late.” By that he means that by the time a few families had pooled their resources and invested in modest 4-inch dredges to work small holdings, the lands had long been allocated to bigger operators so that the people of Port Kaituma found themselves mining illegally. In 2014, a government drive against illegal mining named Operation El Dorado put paid to that.
Operation El Dorado may have been promoted as an initiative designed to bring an end to illegal mining but some of the residents have other views. They believe that what it represented was the manifestation of a powerful lobby by big miners to remove the smaller operators, residents of Port Kaituma, from the lands that had already been allocated to them. The government, some residents say, was only too willing to comply. Some talk about conspiracy theories and corrupt practises and even these days the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission (GGMC) appears reluctant to