Maria Amuchastegui. This. Toronto: Mar/Apr 2007. Vol. 40, Iss. 5; pg.
28, 7 pgs
. . .In a 2005 series called "10 Things Canada Does Best," The Globe
and Mail declared Canada a world leader in raising capital for mining
ventures. Mining companies raised U.S. $4.2 billion on Canadian stock
markets in 2005, and 85 percent of mining deals done worldwide that
year were based in Canada. According to the Department of Foreign
Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT), almost 60 percent of the
world's mining and exploration companies are listed on the Toronto
Stock Exchange or the Calgary-based TSX Venture Exchange. Canadian
mining companies account for over 40 percent of global exploration
budgets and nearly 3,200 concessions in more than ioo countries.
What Canada doesn't do best is hold these domestic mining companies
accountable for the damage they do abroad.
. . .
At the heart of the mining debate is the definition of what constitutes
development. For the World Bank and the mining industry, development
consists of the short-term exploitation of natural resources at the
expense of the environment and the local community. Local communities
across Guatemala are questioning this model, holding plebiscites on
whether to allow mining at all. Besides, El Estor, unlike the
hardscrabble towns of the western highlands, already has a vibrant
economy, with the area producing 80 percent of the world's cardamom.
Cardamom farming, a sustainable industry, generates $1.2 million a year
in revenue for the local economy, which is 50 percent more than the
royalty that Skye would pay to the El Estor municipal government.
"Mining does not bring development," says Martin Col Caal. "Development
comes from tourism and agriculture. Mining brings contamination of the
environment and the persecution of community leaders, those who oppose
the mine.
. . .
Vogt's encounter with the law is typical of a recent and disturbing
trend: the tendency of mining companies to demonize NGOs, blaming them
for local resistance to mining projects. In July 2006, The Wall Street
Journal published an article called "What do NGOs have against poor
Guatemalans?" that blames groups such as AEPDI and MadreSelva for
fomenting opposition to mining. The article claims that Skye's project
will bring much needed development to El Estor, and that it enjoyed
widespread support in the community until Vogt led a campaign against
it. The views in the article, written by a conservative Guatemalan
journalist sympathetic to the mining industry, are echoed by the mining
industry in Canada. The Prospectors and Developers Association of
Canada recently commissioned a study showing that local opposition to
mining was "caused," among other things, by NGO campaigns.
Blaming NGOs is a convenient way for companies to discredit genuine
grassroots opposition by portraying it as coming from an outside
source. But many NGOs do have a mandate to provide communities with
information-information that is not always forthcoming from the
company-and it is this intelligence that can tip the balance of
community opinion against the mine. So it would be more accurate to say
that NGOs empower communities to make their own decision about mining
activities. "I don't consider that my organization is leading any kind
of opposition," says Vogt. "The communities have manifested that they
are not interested in these mining projects. We support that position.
We are committed to giving people information, to accompanying them, to
facilitating, all of those kinds of things. But at the end of the day,
the communities are the ones who have to make the decision."
. . .
Within Canada, civil society groups such as MiningWatch, the Halifax
Initiative and Rights Action, have been instrumental in raising public
awareness and in pressuring the government to hold companies
accountable for social and environmental damage. In 2005, in response
to pressure from civil society groups, the standing committee on
foreign affairs and international trade issued a report on mining in
developing countries. It recommended that the government provide
incentives for companies to act in a socially and environmentally
responsible way, and impose sanctions on those that do not. The
government ignored the recommendations in the report, but agreed to
hold a series of roundtables on mining across the country. The final
one took place in Montreal in November 2006, around the time that
Martin Col Caal and his fellow protesters were being bullied and
tear-gassed.
One of the themes to emerge from these meetings was that voluntary
codes-non-binding guidelines on corporate social responsibility drafted
by the mining industry-don't work. For companies to be held
accountable, the government has to enact binding laws. Another
recurring theme was the need for the application of Canadian laws
outside Canada's borders, given the weakness and corruption of many
governments of developing countries.
The most important theme to emerge was Canada's duty, given the size of
its mining sector, to take leadership in the area of corporate social
responsibility. "If Canada wants to continue to be a leader in this
domain, it should also be a leader in the promotion of corporate social
responsibility," says Richard Janda, a law professor at McGiIl
University who is a senior legal research fellow of the Centre for
International Sustainable Development Law. "It's true that we have a
small population, but in this particular sector we have a huge global
footprint."
