Even as information disseminated by high-profile international agencies, including the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), points to an enhanced focus on eradicating the use of mercury in the global gold recovery industry, local gold miners are reportedly still prepared to defy the widely proven serious health threat linked to the use of the lethal chemical element in pursuit of significantly increasing their earnings from the industry.
Last Sunday’s (September 8th) article on mercury use published in the Stabroek News bared an open official admission by Commissioner of the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission (GGMC) Newell Dennison that the government is rowing against a seemingly unstoppable tide as miners, in their unceasing quest to enhance their gold yield, increasingly embrace a gold-recovery option that could significantly enhance their gold yield but which, over time, could wreak havoc with their health, cut short their life spans and create knock-on deadly environmental pollution.
Largely removed from the direct scrutiny of the GGMC, some local miners, having become aware of the capacity of mercury use to significantly enhance the extent of their gold recovery and by extension, their earnings from the sector, are prepared to defy the warnings emanating from a state agency that lacks the extensive reach required to enforce measures that exist ‘on paper’ to remove mercury from gold recovery operations. Mercury used in the local gold mining sector is believed to be imported largely from neighbouring Brazil.
What has obtained, over time, has been the repeated boisterous pronouncement of the government’s official position on mercury use, never mind the fact that, in real terms, the GGMC has been unable to implement any effective measure to eradicate the ‘importation’ of mercury for use in the gold mining sector. Contextually, the recent refrain by Dennison, restated in the Stabroek News recently, added nothing new to what had already been known to be the GGMC’s official position on mercury use in the mining sector.
Challenges associated with clamping down on mercury use in the gold mining sector is, overwhelmingly, a function of the country’s porous borders which removes the restraint of official oversight from the cross-border movement of mercury into gold-mining operations in Guyana. Simultaneously, legitimate gold recovery operations are reportedly pushing for the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission (GGMC) to embrace the use of mercury in the mining sector, effectively looking past the tomes of scientific studies that have drawn a ‘red line’ through the use of the chemical elements in gold recovery.
The latest disclosure on what is, in effect, a battle between the GGMC and miners bent on increasing their returns on investment would appear to suggest that up to this time the state agency is leagues away from pushing mercury out of the local gold recovery equation. The available evidence may well appear to suggest that it is the delinquent miners who may be ‘winning the mercury war’ up to this time. In his recent interview with the Stabroek News, Dennison points to what he appears to see the enduring problem of miners, citing cost-effectiveness and lack of access to cheaper (and presumably safer) alternatives as reasons for the pursuit of the mercury option.
The persistence of what is believed to be the widespread use of mercury in pursuit of gold recovery in Guyana occurs in defiance of the Minamata Convention on mercury use which commits the signatories to the Convention to working “to reduce, and where feasible eliminate, the use of mercury in artisanal and small-scale gold mining.” The persistence of the use of mercury in pursuit of maximizing gold recovery in Guyana is occurring against the backdrop of reported continual increase in the illegal exportation of gold from Guyana, an issue which has attracted attention here in Guyana, in the United States and elsewhere.
An article in the state-run Guyana Chronicle of June 14 last asserted that “this current administration is attempting to tighten loose ends by instituting and strengthening a series of penalties and sanctions to deal with gold smugglers.”