Over thirty people have crammed into a small wooden hut surrounded by mountains and rice paddies in the village of Bayog. Inside, a lively debate is raging.
“When the company put the monuments to demarcate the land of the mine, some of our land was included inside, but we don’t want our lands to be inside,” states someone in the hut.
23 Canadian organizations issued a call to action to Members of Parliament and all Canadians this week, to ensure that victims of abuse by Canadian extractive companies abroad can access justice in Canada.
Timuay Boy Anoy, a tribal leader of the indigenous Subanens of the Philippines, knows all too well the conflicts that come with a mine. When the Filipino Government handed over Subanen ancestral lands as a concession to a Canadian mining company, the community quickly dissolved into factions of those in favour of the mine and those opposed. Rumours, resistance, manipulation and a lack of transparency began to pull apart the social fabric of the tribe.
Access to land and defense of the environment are major issues in Madagascar. Malagasies are excellent farmers and among the finest rice growers in the world. On the island of Madagascar, there are approximately 14,000 peasants cultivating rice on irrigated lands located about 250 km from the capital city of Antanarivo. The Rakotoarimanana family lives in Ambohibary, a village in the district of Moramanga, and the opening of a mine not far from their home has resulted in a lot of frustration. “Until just a few years ago, we had enough food every day.
The people of the Siria Valley in Honduras may have breathed a sigh of relief in 2010 with the closure of the Canadian-owned San Martin gold mine that sits in their midst, but now they must brace themselves for further environmental destruction and depletion of their water supply. In mid-January, after two years of negotiations and opposition from civil society, a new mining law was finally approved by the Honduran Congress.
It has now been two years since the suited managers of the San Martin open pit gold mine, owned by Goldcorp, packed their bags and left the Siria Valley in central Honduras. They had spent literally hundreds of hours of air time, reassuring the population that the mine hadn’t harmed the surrounding environment.
As proof, they even built an eco-tourism hotel on the mine site, raised cattle and poultry and planted eucalyptus trees everywhere – although the thirsty nature of these in an area with a gradually diminishing water supply seemed to escape them.
These days, things are booming in the mining town of Huanuni, Bolivia. Tin prices are at nearly $10 a pound, compared to $2 in the eighties. The tin extracted from the mine is processed in local foundries, and then sent by boat to Asia, where it ends up in cell phones, laptops, iPods and other electrical goods. Miners are earning unprecedented salaries, which has spawned a tin rush that has men literally fighting for jobs at the COMIBOL state run mine, and young women fighting over the wage-earning miners.
