Head of the Presidential Secretariat and Cabinet Secretary, Dr Roger Luncheon made the comments yesterday at a media briefing. He noted that in recent publications, the mining sector has responded negatively to elements of the Guyana-Norway agreement which commits Guyana to more sustainable mining activities. The administration has deemed the response “regrettable as it points to a seeming unwillingness of the sector to face and to address reality,” he declared.
Miners have expressed profound disagreement with a proposed six-month notice before any mining can commence. At a meeting last Friday they expressed the view that the plan is a threat to the sector’s existence and called on the mines commission to reconsider and withdraw the proposal. The small and large scale miners said that the six-month proposal, if implemented, will see many miners closing their operations and the loss of numerous jobs. The notice period and several other recent measures have been linked to the government’s pursuit of the Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS) and a recent forest protection agreement initialled with the Kingdom of Norway.
But Luncheon said yesterday that long before the promulgation of the LCDS, concerns were being raised and addressed about the impact of mining on the environment. He recalled a number of initiatives undertaken by the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission (GGMC) that became part of Guyana’s commitments in the LCDS and the Guyana-Norway agreement. “Therefore it was clear in the evolution of mining practices within the sector that considerations were actively being pursued for the operators and this was before the LCDS,” he said.
He declared that there is a commitment that government would not support policies to regulate mining out of existence. The interest is to have balanced, sustainable exploitation of natural resources be they mining or forestry, he declared.
According to the Cabinet Secretary, the sentiment in the administration is that mining is too big to fail “and the view consequently is that the negative reaction of the sector is counterproductive as it discourages the development of the necessary new mindset that would bring into existence sustainable mining activity in Guyana”. Luncheon said that in the negotiations with Norway, Guyana sought to establish respect for historical levels of activity in exploitation of natural resources, and there was never, during these discourses and in the commitments, any explicit undertaking to restrict activities in either the mining sector or forestry “in pursuit of ill-defined goals and objectives.
“What we sought to introduce was concrete interventions that pointed to sustainable mining activities, interventions (that) …ante-dated the LCDS, interventions that were generated by concerns about the impact of mining on the environment” and that is what eventually flowed into the LCDS and became part of the Norwegian agreement, the Cabinet Secretary said.
Luncheon said that the contribution of Brazilian entrepreneurs in mining cannot be dismissed lightly. He said government is not unmindful that their arrival might not be controlled, and their activities not administered to the best of the abilities of the GGMC and in accordance with the rules and regulations governing immigration, work permits and such issues but the answer is not to decry the presence and initiate xenophobic reaction to the Brazilians. “We have to spend much more time and provide much more resources in regulating, in implementing, in executing those existing arrangements, policies that govern their presence and their operations,” he said.
He added that he is certain that saner heads would prevail particularly given the price of gold noting that he thinks it is still an attractive sector to be involved in.
