In the week that Natural Resources and the Environment Minister Robert Persaud signed the Minamata Convention on Mercury in Japan this newspaper monitored two mercury-related stories in sections of the international media that had to do with the use and effects of the toxic metal.
The first story was about a 12-year-old Tanzanian boy who has been using his bare hands to mix mercury with ground-up ore to create a mercury-gold amalgam after which he burns off the mercury to retrieve the raw gold. Ibrahim (the boy’s name) has worked in small-scale gold mines since he was nine.
The International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimates indicate that up to one million children work in
