Colombia│FOREST│MINING

Deforestation and mining:

This combo today means

hunger and thirst for tomorrow

 

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.

DÍA MUNDIAL DEL MEDIO AMBIENTE

 

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.

 

 

  

Gerardo Iglesias

Rel-UITA

June 7, 2011

 

 

 

 

* Contaminating open-pit mining in Colombia.

 

 

 

* Video realizado por IN THE SUBJECT para RAZON PUBLICA

 

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