Imagine being told one day that pursuing your long-established livelihood now required six months notice to the state before a decision could even be made whether you were still allowed to do this. This is essentially what miners were presented with recently by the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission (GGMC). It may be that this draconian proposal was just an opening gambit and may now be followed with something less oppressive after Friday’s unanimous rejection of it by the Guyana Gold and Diamond Miners Association.
Whatever happens, it is evident that the government has not clearly thought out how it will action its new found affinity for forest protection and the fight against climate change as defined in the Low Carbon Development Strategy. It also exposes the woeful deficit in good governance over the last 17 years of PPP/C government. As we have said before, when President Jagdeo rose to address Commonwealth Finance Ministers in Georgetown in October, 2007 he shocked the nation into silence when he announced that Guyana was willing to commit nearly all of its forests in the fight against climate change. Hitherto, there had been no consultations on this extravagant and amorphous proposal with the indigenous peoples, the timber industry, the mining sector or other stakeholders.
Had he approached the forests-for-climate fight with the perspicacity that such a sweeping proposal demanded, the GGMC would not have had to try selling an unfeasible proposal for six months’ notice before mining. This could have been avoided or thrashed out a long time ago if the President and his advisors had sat down with all the stakeholders even before the adumbration of the LCDS. Then the indigenous peoples would have set out exactly where they stood on inclusion in such a plan and future applications for titles and enlargements. The foresters would have been able to elaborate on what their needs were and how the state of the industry could be improved while not extracting timber unsustainably. The mining industry would have from the outset been able to present its concerns, in particular, the longstanding contretemps about sub-surface rights in forest concessions and the containment of environmental damage from alluvial and other types of mining.
Those discussions would then have filtered into the government’s larger development plans for the country and its expectations of growth from each sector and vision for the Amerindian communities. Then and only then could the government reasonably construct a plan for the sterilizing of commercial activities like mining in forests. In other words, a custom-made plan was necessary taking full account of all of the traditional forest-embedded activities plus new potentially lucrative carbon generating activities such as commercial oil production. Such a plan should have engendered a detailed analysis of the plausibility of carbon financing mechanisms and whether these could yield what Guyana required.
What is however happening, as in many other government endeavours, is a back-to-front rendering of a plan for a very serious climate initiative and the likely imposing of harsh measures to comply with obligations already agreed such as in the generous agreement offered by the Kingdom of Norway. The six- month notice proposal before any mining is a prime example of this and was preceded by another mandating exploration before mining – an unfathomable concept for small-scale miners.
Ironically, had the government been progressively applying stringent clean mining measures from 1992 onwards it would have been in a much better position today to advance its low carbon initiative. For many years Stabroek News has been at the forefront of lamenting the serious environmental damage being caused to rivers and streams by both local miners and their counterparts from across the Takutu and by all scales of operations: small, medium and large scale. It should not be forgotten that the worst environmental damage caused to the environment was at the hands of Omai Gold Mines Limited which was shockingly let off by the government in relation to the penalties that should have been applied and its obligations to affected communities. Worse, of all mining companies, Omai should have been the one to put every last dollar of its commitment into a reclamation plan to restore the scarred landscape. Instead, the government allowed it to walk away on the flimsy grounds that there might be further prospects for mining in the area – a most injudicious decision. It was vital that Omai of all operators set the best example for reclaiming mined out areas. Further, the odds that there are other rich mineral deposits nearby must be low.
It was this same laxity that led to the pollution of the Konawaruk River to such an extent that it could no longer sustain the diversity of life it was accustomed to. Last year residents of Arau near to the Venezuelan border complained bitterly about the atrocious environment violations by miners. Yet none of these major problems and the dangerous pollution by the wanton use of mercury galvanized the government – that is until recently.
Now the government is trying to play catch up by introducing draconian measures and flooding the interior with mines officers when for many years the complaints by residents of transgressions went unheeded. The same attitude has been evident in the forestry sector. The government did not stringently enforce many of the rules governing forestry and ensure that companies like Barama Company Limited complied with their commitments to value added forestry instead of concentrating on log exports. It is only latterly that the government has cracked down on holders of TSAs and other forests and at a time when the industry was under serious threat.
As we have said before, the time is nigh for the government to factor in the weak outcome of the Copenhagen Climate Summit into the LCDS and for a real hard-nosed assessment of how it could be executed parallel to commercial mining, forestry and the needs of the Amerindian communities. Where there are irresolvable conflicts there must be a mechanism for altering the prevailing benchmarks which at the moment would be those enshrined in the Memorandum of Understanding on forest protection signed with Norway. Before that final agreement is sealed there should be room for amendments to obviate the need to float unworkable proposals like the one for six months notice.
