When using a speech to convince society regarding sensitive issues, in this case the highly questioned mega-mining, promoted as never before by the current government of Ecuador, it has resorted to various concepts that, through repetition, it tries to make them accepted by the common citizen.
The high mining potential, the relationship between mining and the "long-awaited" development and its contributions to the state's economy are perhaps the main arguments of mining companies and the governments that sponsor them.
On the other hand, ecological threats, large-scale waste generated by this industry, the relationship between water, mega-mining and social conflicts are issues that the promoters of mega-mining deny or try to minimize.
The following is an analysis of Carlos Zorrilla, William Sacher, Alberto Acosta within their series «The perverse verses of mining» in this regard:
1. Mining potential
The mining potential presented by the government and mining companies is a fiction.
The vast majority of gold and copper deposits, including projects underway, have not been adequately explored to establish firmly and with a minimum of reliability what they really contain. The optimistic figures blithely handled by the government come from mining companies that inflate their estimates for obvious economic and political interests. This blithe handling of figures has resulted in some of the largest financial scams in history, when mining companies - Canadian in particular - have inflated the value of their deposits to make huge profits on the stock exchanges.
Ecuador is a very different geological formation from Peru and Chile. Its deposits are less rich and concentrated, which makes its mining activity an activity with a greater environmental impact, because it must process a greater quantity of soil and subsoil to obtain profitable production.
2. Mining and development.
It is a fact that mining impoverishes developing countries. Economists, to explain this phenomenon, analyse it as the “Natural Resource Curse” or the “Paradox of Abundance”. It is enough to study the Human Development Index of countries with a high dependence on mining such as Zambia, Sierra Leone, Papua New Guinea, Bolivia, Ghana or the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to know that mining does not equal development.
Compared to other economic activities, large-scale mining generates very few jobs. In countries such as Chile and Peru, it employs approximately 11%3T of the economically active population, and most jobs are filled by skilled labor.
In the case of the Mirador copper project, located in the Cordillera del Cóndor, in the province of Zamora Chinchipe, it is expected that the mine will create around 600 permanent jobs. The current government's own Mining Sector Development Plan 2011-2015 aims for large-scale mining to create "at least 10,000 jobs" nationwide, a meager figure compared to the jobs generated by agriculture, livestock farming or tourism.
3. Economic contribution of mining.
Many problems will arise on the tax side. Large mining companies are champions at avoiding or evading tax payments. Some transnational companies use subsidiaries registered in tax havens, which allows them to avoid paying taxes. These companies usually do not guarantee transparency in order to carry out the evaluation of their activities.
Transnational corporations and complicit governments only highlight the enormous amounts of potential revenue from existing mineral reserves. These figures, which are often highly exaggerated, are intended to sensitize public opinion in favor of mining. However, this view is incomplete. The so-called hidden costs - environmental and social - should be added, including, for example, the economic value of pollution. These are economic losses that normally do not appear in the projects and are transferred to society; remember the oil devastation in the northeastern Ecuadorian Amazon. The list of costs should also include the so-called "perverse subsidies," which are expressed through the provision of energy at lower prices, water at no cost or at reduced cost, and even transport infrastructure.
4. Ecological threats from mining.
Due to the unique climatic, geological, hydrological and biological conditions of the country, and its mega biodiversity, large-scale metal mining in half the world will be a mega disaster. The so-called strategic deposits are located in ecologically and climatically very sensitive sites, with a lot of rain, and in the middle of unique ecosystems, forests and moors, which are home to water sources and dozens of plant and animal species in danger of extinction.
These unique ecosystems - moors and forests - play an indispensable role in the generation and protection of water sources that supply rural and urban populations. Millions of citizens benefit from clean water estuaries. Therefore, comparing mining in Ecuador with mining in the Chilean desert or in the arid highlands of Peru, or with continental countries such as Canada or Australia makes no sense, because there is not a single large-scale mining project in the world, in places similar to those of our mountain ranges, cloud forests and moors, that has not devastated the environment. Therefore, the so-called Environmental Impact Studies of mega-mining, financed by the same mining companies, without exception, are a joke. In addition to being biased and unreliable, they are deficient as a study and embarrassing as a legal instrument.
5. Large-scale waste.
In Canada, large-scale mining produces 60 times more waste – and in the United States, 9 times more – than all the cities and industries in the respective countries. The Panantza-San Carlos project in the province of Morona Santiago alone is expected to process 90,000 tons of soil, subsoil and mineralized rock daily and for decades. That is, over the life of the mine, it is expected to produce around 1.4 billion tons of waste – equivalent to at least 12 Panecillos in the city of Quito. For a small copper project alone, containing 6 % of the supposed Panantza-San Carlos deposit in the Intag area, province of Imbabura, researchers calculated that 600 hectares would be needed exclusively to store solid waste.
It is important to note that gold and copper are not in a pure state, they are usually mixed with other minerals or heavy metals such as sulfur, arsenic, lead, mercury, molybdenum and other highly toxic substances that contaminate soils, rivers, moorlands and rainforests. Some copper deposits even contain radioactive materials.
6. Water and mining.
Due to the process known as acid mine drainage, water from rivers and springs, in combination with air and rainwater and/or groundwater, will poison the water resource for decades and possibly hundreds of years.
This acid drainage is a process by which air or water automatically oxidizes - upon contact - sulphurous minerals, which causes abnormal acidification of mining waste, soils and surface and groundwater.
It should be noted that the large Ecuadorian deposits identified are highly sulphurous, so the risk of this very serious type of contamination is very high in our country.
7. Social conflicts and mining.
Carlos Zorrilla, William Sacher, Alberto Acosta / www.extractivismo.com and www.infomineria.org / Perverse verses of mining series.
SOURCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Positions in the creation of national mining policy http://www.aldeah.org/files/choque_de_visiones_sobre_la_politica_minera__del_ecuador.pdf
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