Illegal gold mining is eating away the Amazon
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PARIS, Feb 18 — Léontine Gallois, Karine Pfenniger
In twenty years, how will this green area look like?
The crooked Rio Arraias and its patchy, muddy pools belong to the Kayapó Indigenous Territory, located in the heart of the Amazon in the Brazilian state Pará. Within four years, between 2016 and 2020, countless spots have been deforested to allow gold mining operations, an illegal activity on Brazilian indigenous territories.
The problem stretches far beyond this region.
Far from Brasilia, Lima and Paramaribo, away from the public eye, illegal mines are destroying the Amazon rainforest at a growing pace, threatening indigenous populations, species and the planet’s greatest ‘green lung’.
In Yanomami Indigenous Territory, about 1700 km away from Kayapó, trees have been pulled out by gold miners too. According to Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP), an NGO that monitors illegal gold mining deforestation in the Amazon, the phenomenon has increased in the past few years.
Between 2017 and 2019, about 10'000 hectares have been deforested for illegal gold mining activities in the Brazilian indigenous territories of Kayapó, Yanomami and Munduruku only. 44% of that deforestation occured in 2019, indicating an acceleration of the process.
Tensions have increased in Brazil last year, as Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro proposed a bill which would legalize commercial mining on indigenous land in early 2020. In Brazil, extractive activities are constitutionally not permitted on indigenous land.
Neighbouring countries experience a similar issue, with countless illegal muddy pools proliferating in the midst of the rainforest.
In Surinam, in northern South America, the amount of illegal small-scale gold mining operations has sharply increased since the beginning of the 21st century, in pace with the sharply rising price of gold on the international market.
In addition to being a key driver of deforestation, the goldrush in Surinam is heavily polluting water bodies, as most small-scale mining operations use mercury to separate gold from soil. Waste is dumped in waterbodies, contaminating fish, endangering ecosystems and putting much of Surinam’s population at risk of mercury poisoning.
According to the NGO Amazon Conservation Team (ACT), most small-scale gold mining activities in Surinam take place within territories that traditionally belong to Maroon — descendents of formerly enslaved Africans — and indigenous communities, such as the Maroon Matawai territory, where the town of Jacobkondre is located.
Deforestation for gold mining purposes is more severe in indigenous and Maroon territories than in the rest of Surinam, ACT notes.
Hosting 13% of the West part of the Amazon, Peru is another key country in deforestation due to illegal gold mining. The region of La Pampa in southern Peru has been the ground for the development of gold mining sites since 2007, the year when the first road crossing the region was made visible by satellite imagery.
Although satellite images picture a critical situation in Peru, they also bring a glimmer of hope. In 2019, the Peruvian government launched the “Operation Mercury” to crack down on illegal mining in the Amazon, and particularly in the Pampa region.
Concerns were that the operation would simply displace miners to neighboring sites. But satellite images of Camanti, Cusco (southern Peru), show another scenario.
According to the NGO MAAP, only 21% of the 382 hectares deforested in the Camanti district since 2017 occurred in 2019, meaning that there has been no increase in gold mining activity in this area since the beginning of “Operation Mercury”.
On some damaged areas, a few spots have even grown green again.
These images show that political implication can have a positive and effective impact on the future of the Amazon.
