Written by Johann Earle
Tuesday, 17 January 2012 19:21
Know more about French Guiana
This country has a rich biodiversity with 83.1 percent of the country covered by equatorial rainforest. It is home to a vast array of flora and fauna of which 5,750 plant species, 718 bird species, some 183 species of mammals, 480 species of freshwater fish and 108 species of amphibian have been inventoried. French Guiana’s 83,000 square kilometers of Amazon forests contain nearly half of France’s biodiversity. It is home to some of the most fragile and richest ecosystems in the world, with primary tropical forests, mangroves, savannahs and numerous types of wetlands. |
Illegal gold mining by persons using mercury for recovery, along the border with Brazil, is threatening the Amazon Rainforest in French Guiana – this activity has been happening since the late 1990s. Despite efforts to address illegal gold mining, the high price of gold is fueling more and more illegal miners to enter the vast forest to prospect for gold and it is a challenge for the authorities. Because of illegal gold mining activity, between 1999 and 2001, 6,421 hectares of the rainforest were impacted in the country and by 2008, this changed to 20,936 hectares.
Because of the naturally high content of mercury in the Amazonian soil, any additional mercury becomes a threat to human health, the forests and water ecosystems. 30 tons of mercury are discharged into the natural environment of the Guianas every year. “This is common not only in French Guiana but also in Guyana, Suriname and in Brazil or wherever this type of small mining is”, explains Rickford Vieira, the Regional Gold Mining Pollution Abatement Officer for WWF Guianas, who has worked in French Guiana from 2004 to 2011 and has knowledge about the effects of gold mining on the rainforest there. “In French Guiana, the legal miners do not use mercury since it was banned by decree in 2006. However, the majority of miners are illegal”, he says. The price of gold is another factor fueling deforestation and noted that in the last five years gold has increased in price by some 600 percent. There is more people involved in the sector who were not mining before.
Gold mining using mercury is damaging French Guiana’s forest ecosystems in many ways. “They first cut down the trees, then remove the topsoil to get the gold-bearing material out, and then the wastewater pollute the forest ecosystems”, says Rickford Vieira. WWF Guianas estimates that to produce 1kg of gold, the miners use at least 1kg of mercury, endangering their health and that of the local people living nearby.
About the inspection
There is no state control over a large part of the sector. It is very hard to pin down the illegal miners through legislation because they are very mobile and are geographically scattered. “The military would come, spend three months, get most of the illegal miners out, and when the military leaves the miners come back”, says Vieria. “You would find a couple here, a couple there. It is very hard to monitor, given the population of French Guiana”, he explains. Vieira estimates the illegal gold miners to number about 5,000.
The challenge of small scale mining is that of livelihood rather than one of damage to the environment. “I don’t think that there is any small miner out there who is unable to understand that his activities are causing damage. But what he will say to you is that he has to make a living and if he had an alternative he probably would have been doing that,” said Dr. David Singh, Director General of Conservation International.
One of the limitations of small scale mining is that there is a level of disorganization which is intrinsic to small scale mining activity. “Many of these miners work in isolation of each other and there is little chance of them being able to come together so that economies of scale can kick in and so that they could become involved in regeneration activities,” he said.
Payment for environmental services?
To Dr. David Singh, the threat of mining and infrastructural development to the rainforest must be put into context. “All of those activities that constitute threats are driven by economic need and within the context of escalating global commodity prices that is a natural human trend. If you can then balance that by incentives which are based on the maintenance of these eco-systems, then is when you could have a discussion on tradeoffs. The rainforest would not be purely providing commodities but a bundle of goods and services. The benefits that accrue to people can then be seen not as the commodities that could be gotten out of the rainforest but the bundle of services that could be derived from”.
Dr. Singh said that what the reform of natural resource management laws, there could be the spawning of a new industry surrounding the regeneration of mined out areas. He said that perhaps some of the royalties that the miners pay when they sell their gold or lease or purchase their claim could go towards regeneration activities.
David Singh said that countries must value their rainforest for the range of services it provides rather than what could be extracted. “The international community is now willing to pay for the services of rainforests because of what they provide globally. There is an opportunity for a game-change, where countries can now see what is indeed a local asset and what is indeed a global asset actually become a national asset over and above the resources that could be extracted from it”.
