Dear Editor,
For some years I have been responding to invitations to the public from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to consider the Environmental and Social Impact Assessment (ESIA) of Pharsalus Gold Inc. The EPA’s website was utterly useless for communication, but I got a response to my written submissions and was subsequently accorded the courtesy of dealing with an Environmental Officer (EO), who never herself answered my queries – and who never pretended she could, but who merely passed on my concerns (to whom, I don’t know).
Last year was my latest round of correspondence. I was notified by the same EO when Pharsalus Gold Inc modified their ESIA. There was, as usual, no direct answer to my limited queries so I had to pore through 460 pages to find whether my concerns were addressed. The assurances I was seeking seemed to have been dealt with as follows:
“PGI will follow the International cyanide code as much as possible. Differences will however occur where facilities are inadequate in Guyana to support the full code. PGI is a fully owned subsidiary of Troy Resources which is an ISO 14001 accredited operator in Argentina and a voluntary member of the Australian Code of Environmental management.”
But also much is made of use of the International Cyanide Code in other parts of the ESIA without the rider “as much as possible”.
My reply in December 2014 to the EPA was:
“Thank you for the CD with the updated info. I found some of the information I was seeking, even though I find it unsatisfactory that you could not answer my questions directly.
“I am much more relieved, but there still needs to be:
“1 A timeline for Pharsalus Gold Inc to be a Guyana facility signatory to the International Cyanide Code
“2 A sine qua non commitment to the transparent and publicly available auditing of the cyanide use so that in the event of any spill at any stage of the operations we can measure from the records just how much cyanide would have been spilt.”
So when I saw the Troy Resources Guyana Inc project update in your yesterday’s colour centre pages, I searched the International Cyanide Code website to see if they were by now a signatory. According to the website they were not, neither Pharsalus nor Troy. All the other perks they are advertising that they will be doing for us are good, but other users of our resources say similar things. The “Project Update” I am looking to see is the one where they announce they have become a signatory to the International Cyanide Code.
Yours faithfully,
Alfred Bhulai
