By Barbara Fraser, mongabay.com, October 11, 2011
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| Río Huepetuhue gold mine in Peru. Photo by Rhett A. Butler |
As the price of
gold inches upward on international markets, a dead zone is spreading across
the southern Peruvian rain forest. Tourists flying to Manu or Tambopata, the
crown jewels of the country’s Amazonian parks, get a jarring view of a muddy,
cratered moonscape ... and then another ... and another in what the country
boasts is its capital of biodiversity.
While alluvial gold
mining in the Amazon is probably older than the Incas, miners using motorized
suction equipment, huge floating dredges and backhoes are plowing through the
landscape on an unprecedented scale, leaving treeless scars visible from outer
space.
Sources close to
the Peruvian Environment Ministry say the government is considering declaring
an environmental emergency in the region, but emergency measures passed two
years ago were not enough to contain the destruction, and some observers doubt
that a new decree would have any more impact.
Meanwhile, on Oct.
1, a government prosecutor in Madre de Dios, the southeastern region that is
the epicenter of Peru’s illegal or “informal” placer mining, ordered the
detention of Congressman Amado Romero, a member of President Ollanta Humala’s
party, for environmental crimes linked to illegal mining.
As the price of
gold has skyrocketed in the past few years, miners have spread out from older
mining areas in Madre de Dios, staking claims and beginning operations before
they have the necessary environmental permissions. This year, miners have taken
over swathes of the buffer zone of the Tambopata Nature Reserve, at the heart
of one of the Madre de Dios region’s prime ecotourism areas, and some have
ventured into the reserve itself.
The gold rush has
spread upstream, as well, where backhoe operators are dredging up small
mountains of sediment along rivers that plunge through the cloud forest in the
Andean foothills, one of the most biodiverse – and least studied – places on
the planet.
Diversity
unexplored – and under fire
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| Run-off from from a mining area to Amazon, photo by Rhett A. Butler |
The corridor
between the Andean highlands and the Amazonian lowlands has both a high number
and diversity of species and a large number of endemics – species found nowhere
else, says Kenneth Young, a botanist and biogeographer from the University of
Texas at Austin who has spent decades studying the montane forests.
“You’re coming up
the foothills and all of a sudden, between 700 meters and 1,500 meters, you
have an area where cloud forest flora can come down and reach its lower limit
and Amazon lowland flora can come up and reach its higher limit, and you have
unique things in there, too,” he says.
The lack of roads
makes it difficult – and expensive – to do research in the Andean foothills.
The data that exist are from a few rapid assessments in which researchers
helicoptered in to remote places or from longer-term studies at field plots
closer to the few existing roads.
“This (area) is
often blanketed in clouds. It’s poorly known to science. There are only a few
places where roads exist,” says tropical ecologist Gregory Asner of the
Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford University. “We don’t know the
composition of the ecosystems. We don’t know how they’re put together.”
Ecologists may lose
their chance to learn more about important parts of the rain forest.
Deforestation has risen as mining has displaced agriculture as the main driver
of deforestation in Peru’s southeastern Madre de Dios region.
A simple graph of
gold prices over the last three decades tells the story. In the mid 1970s, gold
sold on international markets at less than $200 an ounce. A sharp increase in
the early 1980s – spiking to more than $800 an ounce at one point, before
hovering above $600 – drove a gold rush that was accompanied by accusations of
child labor in the dirty, dangerous pursuit of the precious metal.
With prices under
$400 in the late 1990s and the first years of this century, the gold rush
petered out, although areas like Huepetuhue – which shows up as a white blotch
on satellite photos – and Laberinto remained mining centers.
Half a dozen years
ago, the price of gold began a dizzying climb, from about $400 an ounce in 2005
to a peak of nearly $1,900 in late August 2011, before dipping to the current
level of about $1,600.
That makes gold
mining more profitable than virtually any other work, especially for unskilled
laborers, and some 200 migrants a day have been flooding into Madre de Dios
from other parts of Peru, according to regional government officials. Between
1993 and 2007, the region’s population grew at an average 3.5 percent annually –
the highest rate in the country, according to Peruvian Census data.
Gold prices,
deforestation, mercury imports go hand in hand
The rising price of
gold and arrival of prospectors have been accompanied by a surge in
deforestation and other environmental problems. A study by US, French and Peruvian researchers published
in April showed a correlation among gold prices, deforestation and Peru’s
importation of mercury, which miners use to separate gold it from alluvial
sediment.
While gold prices
increased by an average of 18 percent annually over the past decade, the
researchers found that deforestation in gold-mining areas sextupled, from 292
hectares per year between 2003 and 2006 to 1,915 hectares annually between 2006
and 2009.
Such high
deforestation rates could derail Peru’s plans to woo more REDD and REDD+
carbon-storage schemes, if the country cannot guarantee that its forests will
remain intact.
Palm swamps are
favorite mining spots. Although difficult to reach, they provide an ready
source of water to operate the high-pressure hoses miners use to blast huge
craters in the jungle, exposing old river beds where gold washed from the Andes
over millions of years. Across the landscape, swamps are now punctuated by
brown smears where miners have blasted pits that can be 20 or 30 feet deep.
Mining palm swamps
may be even more serious for Peru’s carbon balance, because studies indicate
that the peat in the swamps may hold the highest concentrations of carbon.
Mining not only removes that from Peru’s carbon-storage calculations, but could
also emit large quantities of greenhouse gases.
The region’s
forests are not the only victims of illegal mining. The study published in
April by Jennifer Swenson of Duke University and colleagues from Duke, France’s
Ecole Nationale des Ingenieurs des Travaux Agricoles de Bordeaux and CESEL
Ingenieros in Lima, found that Peru’s mercury imports have risen along with
gold prices and deforestation rates.
Miners use mercury
to amalgamate gold, separating it from sediment. They then heat the amalgam,
usually over an open flame, to vaporize the mercury. When they sell the chunk
of gold at a shop in Puerto Maldonado or a smaller town, a shop employee heats
the gold again, to avoid paying the miner for the weight of residual mercury.
Miners spill
mercury onto the ground and into waterways during amalgamation, and miners,
gold shop personnel and pedestrians passing by the shops inhale mercury vapor.
Luis Fernández, a tropical ecologist at the Carnegie Institution for Science at
Stanford University, has found high mercury levels in some fish in the Puerto
Maldonado market and in the air inside and outside gold shops in that city.
Lawlessness and
weak enforcement
In an effort to
safeguard the forests in Madre de Dios, Peru’s first environment minister,
Antonio Brack, who left office in July when the new administration took office,
confronted mining head on, calling the miners “illegal.”
Most actually have
legal concessions, although only a handful have met all the requirements for
operating, which include having approved environmental impact studies. Miners
complain – and regional government officials admit – that the impact study
approval process is hopelessly backlogged. Instead of waiting months or years
for approval, miners begin operating as soon as they have their claims, knowing
that the government lacks the means, and perhaps the will, to enforce the law.
The situation is
further complicated because the regional government has the power to grant
small-scale mining claims, while the national government grants concessions for
other activities, such as agriculture, Brazil nut harvesting, timber and
ecotourism.
The result is a
patchwork of overlapping claims that is almost impossible to untangle. Critics
have long called for land-use planning in the region, and while zoning plans
have existed since the 1970s, they have never been implemented.
Complicating matters
further is a frontier-like atmosphere of lawlessness in the Madre de Dios
region, where illegal logging, illegal mining, contraband smuggling and drug
running converge along the newly paved highway, which makes it easier to
transport equipment and contraband.
Brack tried to
impose some order on the region’s chaos with an “urgent decree” issued in
January 2010, which outlawed the huge dredges operating on the region’s rivers
and limited mining to an area along the Madre de Dios River, where the majority
of claims existed.
The decree also
suspended the granting of new mining claims for a year. As soon as that
prohibition expired, however, miners lined up at the regional mining office in
Puerto Maldonado, the capital of Madre de Dios, to stake new claims. One result
was the sudden appearance of a new mining zone – a cratered area visible from
the air that did not appear on satellite images just 15 months ago.
The new area is a
few miles from, and parallel to, another swathe, called Guacamayo, where mining
began around 2007. By 2010, Guacamayo’s shallow alluvial deposit had played
out, leaving a muddy, treeless expanse of water-filled pits, and miners went in
search of the next trove. Some moved to the new, parallel deposit, while others
crossed the Interoceanic Highway into the Tambopata Reserve buffer zone, along
the Malinowsky River.
Efforts at
crackdown meet resistance
Efforts to evict
miners from the protected area have met with limited success. When police or
prosecutor’s office personnel arrive at mining camps, they find them empty – or
find themselves outnumbered by angry miners armed with machetes. If they
destroy equipment, the miners simply replace it.
Because mining and
the services supporting it – from transportation to food to wire transfers of
money to tiny towns in the highlands – drive Madre de Dios’ economy, any effort
to crack down meets resistance.
That was true even
during the last administration, when the government issued a decree limiting
the mining area and outlawing large dredges on the rivers. There is likely to
be even more resistance now, since the region voted strongly for Peru’s new
president, Ollanta Humala, who took office July 28.
Before he was
elected to Peru’s Congress from Madre de Dios in April, Amado Romero was leader
of the region’s federation of small-scale miners and headed protests against
the decree and then-Environment Minister Antonio Brack. In August, Romero
introduced legislation in Congress to try to repeal the decree. Several
Peruvian news media then reported that Romero operated illegal mining claims in
Madre de Dios, taking payment from “guest” miners who paid a percentage of
their daily take in exchange for being allowed to mine on his claims.
Humala’s Gana Perú
coalition suspended Romero and a congressional ethics commission is investigating
him for potential illegal activity and conflicts of interest. On Oct. 1, a
special prosecutor in Madre de Dios ordered Romero detained on charges of “environmental
crimes” related to his mining claims.
Sources close to
the Environment Ministry indicated in late September that the government was
considering declaring an environmental emergency in Madre de Dios. Other
Amazonian countries – including Bolivia and Ecuador – have sent military troops
to evict illegal miners, but Peru’s measure, if issued, may not go to that
extreme, especially since most of the government’s base of support is in
regions like Madre de Dios and neighboring Puno, where tens of thousands of
people work as wildcat gold miners.
By law, an
environmental emergency decree must be accompanied by a plan for solving the
problem. Any such plan for Madre de Dios would have to involve a long list of
government agencies, including the Environment, Health, Education,
Transportation, Labor and Energy and Mines ministries, the police and
judiciary, tax authorities and the regional government.
Biologist Ernesto
Raez, director of the Environmental Sustainability Center at Cayetano Heredia
University in Lima, says an emergency decree would not address the underlying
problem of government neglect in Madre de Dios, where tank trucks unload
contraband gasoline in mining camps in broad daylight, underage girls are
trafficked for sex, and there are no controls on heavy machinery entering the
region along the only existing major road.
Instead of issuing
an emergency measure, Raez argues, the government should begin by enforcing
existing laws, which would require both political will and budget allocations.
“There’s no need
for any type of legal decree,” Raez says. “What is needed is action by
authorities, supported by the law.”
Barbara Fraser is a
freelance journalist based in Lima, Peru. Her work has appeared in EcoAmericas,
The Daily Climate, The Lancet, Environmental Science & Technology,
Environmental Health News, Science World, National Catholic Reporter, Catholic
News Service and other publications. She also worked for seven years as
director and English-language editor of Latinamerica Press, a bilingual
bulletin of news and analysis from Latin America and the Caribbean. She won the
Eileen Egan Award for reporting on humanitarian issues, national circulation
category, in 2004, 2007 and 2010. Barbara is a member of the Society of
Environmental Journalists, the National Association of Science Writers and the
Foreign Press Association of Peru.
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