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On December 20, 2006, the United Nations General
Assembly declared 2011 the International Year of
Forests. Our region is commemorating the year by
felling trees and giving free reign to uncontrolled
mining.
In 30 years Latin America lost an area of
forest equivalent to almost the size of the
territory of Colombia. From 1980 to 2010 the
continent went from having 992 million hectares of
forest to only 884 million.
Colombia
is still a green country, with 53.5 percent of its
continental land covered by forests, but forest
destruction is advancing at a vertiginous rate.
A study conducted by the Amazon Scientific Research
Institute reveals that from 2002 to 2007
deforestation in the Colombian Amazon rainforest
went from 35,700 square kilometers to 41,790 square
kilometers (roughly 5.7 million
soccer fields).
At the Forum for Urabá convened last Friday,
June 3 by IUF Latin America, Colombian
Agriculture and Development Minister Juan Camilo
Restrepo Salazar stated that the country’s
deforestation is advancing at a rate of 350,000
hectares a year.
The minister also informed that “in Urabá alone
mining rights have been granted over 1.9 million
hectares, out of the region’s 2.4 million hectares
of land.”
Coming as it does on top of cattle-raising
activities and the expansion of single-crop farming
with sugarcane and African palm plantations geared
for agrofuel production, mining will weigh heavily
on the sustainability of natural forests, exerting a
brutal and decisive pressure.
Mining in Colombia currently receives more
than 30 percent of all direct foreign investment.
With companies paying minimum taxes (and even less
in the future), inadequate environmental
regulations, precarious labor, and a national rate
of unionization that stands at barely 5 percent for
private sector workers, this is a very attractive
scenario for transnational corporations.
Deforestation and mining are causing major
environmental and social impacts in Colombia.
Both activities are conducted in a framework of
corruption and seriously flawed state controls.
Recent data reveals that illegal felling in
Colombia represents as much as 42 percent of all
wood production. The mining sector, for its part,
presents its own problems. We know today that the
Colombian Institute of Geology and Mining (Ingeominas) –which
boasts of being an agency that manages Colombia’s
mining resources efficiently and responsibly– “had a
mining permit trafficking network that operated
throughout the country granting rights in banned
areas and even in Venezuelan territory.”
(El Tiempo, May 5, 2011)
As documented by the magazine Revista Poder,
signs offering “Mining rights over 1,500 hectares
for sale in Boyacá…” or with similar offers can be
seen on roads everywhere.
In its June 2 online edition, the newspaper El
Espectador reported that “in just eight years
the number of land titles granted increased by 33,
but controls did not expand accordingly. At most we
could concede that this growth –from 187 titles
granted under the Gaviria administration, 172
in the Samper administration, and 221 in the
Pastrana administration, the number jumped to
7,397 under Uribe– is due to so-called
investment confidence and the significant rise in
global fuel prices. What is inadmissible, however,
is the free-for-all that was allowed.”
Forests are the ecosystems that produce the most
water, and in Colombia they are being
destroyed. “Mega gold mining projects at high
altitudes require a thousand liters of water per
second just to obtain one gram of gold. That means
that one day of production demands as much water as
an entire city of 600,000.* It is not hard to
forecast, then, that Colombia will soon be
facing a thirsty future.
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