Natural Resources Minister Raphael Trotman on Thursday reported a 60% increase in gold declarations for the year so far, which he credited in part to the successes in curbing smuggling.
Trotman told reporters at a news conference that gold declarations stood at 243,000 ounces, compared with the same period last year, when the declarations stood at a total of 151,000 ounces.
He said the ministry believes that its efforts at curbing smuggling “are starting to bear fruit.” While stressing that he could not go into too much details, he noted that the ministry did start a programme which has since been taken over the Ministry of Public Security Ministry and the Special Organised Crime Unit (SOCU). “We are starting to see a shift in the trends… I am not going to say that we can say that we have won or everything is in order but certainly it definitely shows that we are getting more declarations from local mining,” he added.
He said another factor is that the small and medium miners continue to very diligent and productive in the fields even though the prices are “a bit sluggish.” “Certainly not the $1800 that we enjoyed a few years ago,” he noted.
Trotman also credited the increased declarations to the entrance of Troy Resources and Guyana Goldfields into the mining sector. The two foreign large-scale gold companies began operations in the latter half of last year and they were credited for the increase in gold declarations for 2015 amounting to 451,490 ounces, representing a 16.5% increase over the declarations for 2014.
In January, Trotman had announced that approximately 15,000 ounces of gold were being smuggled out of Guyana weekly. He had said then that the gold was being moved illegally to Brazil and Suriname then through airports in North America and Europe to locations as far as the Middle East.
The Guyana Gold & Diamond Miners Association (GGDMA) had subsequently dismissed that figure as “ridiculous,” saying that while smuggling is occurring it found it difficult to fathom that the amount cited by the minister was being smuggled out of the country each week.
