Maligned mining sector says digging for new image
Date: 20-May-02
Country: PERU
Author: Missy Ryan
While drilling, output and the unforgiving bottom line were hot topics at an international gold conference this week in Lima attended by top mining executives and officials from 26 countries, "sustainable development" was another big buzzword.
According to experts, sustainable development includes maintaining good relations with towns and villages near mines, often in remote and poor areas like Peru's central Andes, social investment in schools and hospitals and environmental protection such as rules for disposing of toxic chemicals.
"We're all living with the legacy of some poor actors who were not environmentally responsible. That's something that's used against this industry today, and it's (our) responsibility to try to change that image," Barrick Gold President Randall Oliphant told the conference.
While the sector has a history of pollution, the world's biggest gold companies have come a long way in spending on social and environmental protection, many experts said.
"We recognize that putting sustainable development practices in place in the mining sector isn't easy. But if it's done well, it is investing in the future," said World Bank International Finance Corp. Mining Manager Kent Lupberger.
U.S. metals company Doe Run Co., for example, has pledged to spend $168 million over 10 years to clean up a desperately polluted Peruvian refinery town, where people have shown blood lead content close to biological tolerance levels, that is home to its La Oroya refinery.
"These days, we are judged not only by our earnings, but by our actions," said Roque Benavides, general manager of Peruvian miner Buenaventura . Buenaventura holds a minority stake in Latin America's biggest gold mine, Yanacocha, controlled by U.S. Newmont Mining .
Big companies say they are bending over backward to prove that the days of widespread pollution are in the past, and they assert that small-scale, unregulated mining is now the chief culprit of today's mining-related environmental degradation.
"There are companies that take environmental precaution very seriously and others that don't, but the situation gets a lot worse with small-scale mining," Lupberger said.
SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY ACCEPTED
In Peru, the formal mining sector employs 60,000 people, but officials say the true number of Peruvian miners soars when informal miners - many of whom go it alone with their picks and plastic-roofed shacks - are counted.
Peru, Latin America's top gold producer, has had its share of mining-related scandals.
In 2000, almost 50 villagers were poisoned when a truck carrying mercury from Yanacocha spilled its load near a remote Andean village.
"Mining has been really demonized. People don't feel they've been treated fairly," said Luis Barrenechea, president of Peru's Association of Mining Municipalities.
With better communication, he said, the sector could beat its bad rap. "Five years ago, it was almost sacrilege to talk about social responsibility of mining companies. Today it's accepted," he said.
Experts said while practices have improved, many companies have failed to communicate their environmental and social efforts effectively and thus are still viewed suspiciously.
"We've got to do a better job at projecting who we are and what we've done," said South Africa's AngloGold CEO Robert Godsell.
But sector officials were quick to warn that large mining companies should not be expected to fill in for the state in terms of single-handedly providing schools and roads in the areas where they operate.
Barrenechea told an anecdote about negotiations to buy up land for giant copper-zinc mine Antamina in Peru's central department of Ancash. One woman - offered $20,000 for a plot that yielded $200 annually - refused to sell because she believed, according to her Andean religion, that she would be trading off the spirits of her ancestors.