South America / Central America

BOGOTA/RIO DE JANEIRO (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Rising gold prices are bad news for the Amazon rainforest. Demand for gold will heat up and illegal mining will increase, leading to deforestation and violence against indigenous communities.

Gold, traditionally seen as a safe haven for funds during political unrest and financial crises, has seen its price rise above $2,000 an ounce in early April. We are approaching an all-time high.

Parts of the Amazon Basin, which stretches across nine South American countries, have been mined for gold since the late 16th century.

For centuries, miners have used shovels and primitive dressing pans to search for tiny gold nuggets buried in mud and sand in the waters and banks of Amazonian rivers.

For decades, the Amazon Basin has been a hub for small-scale illegal gold mining, and illegal mining has surged since the early 2000s, when soaring gold prices sparked a gold rush. .

Countries such as Brazil, which has the largest area of ​​the Amazon rainforest, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela all have areas heavily affected by illegal gold mining.

Indigenous groups are often affected. According to the World Resources Institute, more than 20% of indigenous land overlaps with areas subject to mining concessions or illegal mining.

Small-scale gold mining in Brazil is most prevalent around the Tapajos River basin in the northern state of Para.

Another hot mining area is the Yanomami, an indigenous group that straddles the Venezuela-Brazil border. Illegal mining here increased 20-fold from 2015 to 2020.

Peru is the world’s sixth-largest gold producer, but illegal gold mining thrives in the Madre de Dios rainforest. It’s one of the most biodiverse regions of the Amazon, stretching along the Brazilian border in the southeast.

Unlicensed prospectors who have flocked to find gold deposits have destroyed forests, polluted rivers and brought deadly diseases to indigenous communities in the Amazon.

Over the past decade, a series of gold rushes in Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador and Bolivia have destroyed large swaths of the former forests, eventually turning them into bleak, crater-strewn desert landscapes. There is also land

Mercury used by illegal miners to separate gold from gravel polluted rivers, soil and food.

Standing water from mining wells is also a breeding ground for mosquitoes that carry diseases such as malaria. Miners are often the first to introduce malaria to an area.

In the Madre de Dios region of Peru, the heart of the gold mining industry, human traffickers prey on poor rural indigenous women and girls, under the pretext of introducing them to high-paying jobs. They are forced into prostitution at the bar they go to.

Cracking down on illegal gold mining is complex, and authorities have struggled to address the issue.

In April, U.S. President Joe Biden announced plans to contribute $500 million to a fund to curb the destruction of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest and end the drivers of deforestation, including illegal gold mining. The proposal is subject to approval by the US Congress.

In recent years, Brazilian and Peruvian militaries have raided miners’ camps, arrested and prosecuted miners, and seized equipment such as dredgers and bulldozers.

In 2019, Peru sent more than 1,000 police and military units to try to root out illegal gold mining in the La Pampa region of Madre de Dios. The sharp rise in gold prices has exacerbated deforestation.

In February this year, the Brazilian Environmental Protection Agency launched an operation with armed forces. It attempted to expel thousands of illegal gold miners from the country’s largest indigenous reserve, inhabited by the Yanomami.

But police and military crackdowns only temporarily stop illegal mining on a narrow scale. The so-called “balloon effect” is that mining will soon start somewhere else, and illegal mining that is locked out of one area will inflate elsewhere.

To keep miners out, environmentalists have called for laws protecting indigenous rights, including the right of indigenous communities to be heard about large-scale mining operations planned on their lands. point out the need for reinforcement.

In Ecuador, an indigenous group has sued to defend its land from illegal mining and won in the Supreme Court.

Ecuador’s indigenous Cofan people have set up the country’s first IT-equipped, uniformed vigilante group to fight illegal mining. This unit regularly patrols tribal lands to keep miners at bay.

(Translation: Eacleren)