Militant small miners say allocation of lands still favours big players

Some of the Syndicate members meeting at the Girl Guides Pavilion on Tuesday.

Just over a week after Natural Resources Minister Raphael Trotman had ‘talked up’ gold-mining syndicates as a potential economic breakthrough for “hundreds of Guyanese men and women,” representatives of nine of the fifteen syndicates already created are demanding a meeting with President David Granger in an effort to break what they say has been a frustrating logjam relating to the distribution of land to syndicates.

The Ministry of Natural Resources has since said that it will be meeting with the syndicates and two other mining groups on September 7 on their grievances.

In stark contrast to gatherings of just months ago of an upbeat group of small miners buoyed by the prospect of being collectively allocated long-awaited mining lands, around fifteen members of nine syndicates gathered at the Girl Guides Pavilion on Tuesday vented their spleen on the Ministry of Natural Resources over what they say has been the imposition of unprecedented limits on lands available to mining syndicates in circumstances where individual large-scale miners control much larger tracts of mining lands. Following several random interjections which threatened to push the meeting out of control the syndicate members told Stabroek Business that they felt that it would require a meeting with President Granger to resolve their concerns.

What now appears to be an