As the two-week ultimatum given by the Guyana Gold and Diamond Miners Association (GGDMA) for a meeting with President David Granger to discuss taxes and other issues approaches an end, a well-placed mining administration official has told Stabroek Business that there is real concern over the association’s threatened cessation in gold production in the event that the effort to meet with the President does not bear fruit.
According to the official,
up to last Wednesday there had been no response to the GGDMA’s meeting request. Asked whether there were plans already in the making to make good the threat to take action, the official said that there was no reason to believe that the GGDMA members were not serious about taking the threatened action. The official said that as far as he was aware some discussions regarding possible strategies to take action that might sharply reduce the country’s gold production might already have been discussed among some miners.
The GGDMA and the Guyana Women Miners Organisation (GWMO) have officially written to Granger requesting a meeting to discuss the new tax regime for the industry.
In what sections of the media have described as the miners’ meet-us-or-else demand the GGDMA along with the GWMO issued a statement at the end of January calling for a meeting with members of the gold industry, which they said “is currently recognized as the economic driver of our country… within the next two weeks.”
While the industry source told this newspaper that the key purpose of the meeting was to seek a rethink by government of what they believed was a counterproductive tax regime for the sector, he said the request had also been prompted by miners’ frustration over what they believed was a disinclination for consultation by government. “I can tell you that there is a concern among the miners regarding the manner in which government went about dealing with the issue of the taxes. The miners believe that they do enough to contribute to the economy of the country to warrant being consulted,” the source said.
And the source told Stabroek Business that while the miners had no wish to second guess the situation and therefore, it would be too soon to say that a strategy had been worked out for a protest he believed that “some amount of thinking would have already gone into determining the miners’ next move.” He said the likelihood of some of the larger local miners agreeing to absorb the lion’s share of the financial impact of a decision to scale back on production was one option that might emerge.
Setting aside the likely implications of a protest by the miners on the longer-term relationship between government and the two mining bodies the source said there was also a concern regarding the likely impact of a halt or even a slowdown and its possible implications for gold smuggling.
The GGDMA, meanwhile, is frowning on what it says are efforts to divide the loyalties of its members from those of smaller mostly itinerant miners. This posture coincides with the initiative by the Ministry of Natural Resources spearheaded by Minister in the Ministry Simona Broomes to create what the ministry is referring to as mining syndicates in an effort to empower the large number of smaller miners, including itinerant ones, and provide them with a more permanent foothold in the sector.
