– take heart from their meeting with the President
PRIME Minister Sam Hinds, under whose purview the subject falls, is calling on miners to take heart following their meeting Thursday with the President and to now focus on moving the industry forward.
“Let us now put our hearts and heads and hands together, and take small and medium-scale mining in Guyana to the next level,” he urged in a statement late Friday, adding that after Thursday’s meeting, miners are now reassured that it was not the government’s intention to put an end to mining, but rather to help put the industry and miners on a path of growth and development.
Noting that there was much distortion of the government’s intent prior to the meeting, and that it was quite natural in the circumstances that there be fears and anxieties, Mr. Hinds said: “Seldom, if ever, can things be maintained the same way; things are continuously changing, perhaps nowhere so rapidly as in the small and medium-scale mining sector, where relatively small economic mineral occurrences are rapidly exhausted.”
Giving a rundown on the state of the industry in the last 25 years in terms of the methods used to extract gold and diamonds by small and medium-scale concerns, he said most of the mining was at one time done by way of either suction dredging employing the use of divers, or missile dredging using gravel pumps. But by the early 1990s, however, the rivers were so exhausted that many prospectors turned to land dredging, using the hydraulic system.
And with the latter mode of extraction now rapidly giving way to dry mining, which employs the use of backhoes, Mr. Hinds said the 200 equipments currently in operation are raising such a stink environmentally that there is now increasing pressure for the use of tailings ponds and a flocculent to help rid the rivers in their immediate environs of polluted water, not to mention the need for restoration and re-vegetation of mined-out areas.
With respect to diamonds, Mr. Hinds said that Kurupung, at the heart of what is considered ‘diamond territory’, was essentially dead at the end of the 1900s in that the area was virtually exhausted of the quality of stones it was economically viable to recover. The introduction of the Brazilian Lavador, however, saw the revival of  Kurupung to its former glory, with the recovery of a much finer grade of stone.
Noting that there is no doubt a need for a system that will give a better recovery of gold, Mr. Hinds said miners can depend on the assistance of the GGMC in seeking and demonstrating new equipment and techniques, which should sustain them so that they not only survive but prosper once they apply themselves responsibly.
Contending that the furore which preceded Thursday’s meeting may well turn out to be “a bad thing that brought good results,” Mr. Hinds said President Jagdeo advised miners to be realistic in their planning and thinking of the future, and cautioned  that they should be wary of behaving as if prices will keep rising and not hold steady and fall sometime.
A case in point, the President said, was the experience of our very own rice farmers and millers who over-extended themselves in the early 1990s when the demand and prices for rice from ACP (African, Caribbean and Pacific) and OCT (Overseas Countries and Territories) countries were high. Unfortunately for them, he said, when the demand petered out by the end of the 90s with the dwindling of those protected overseas markets, it took nearly a decade for many farmers to recover from bankruptcy and other financial difficulties they found themselves in.
He said that while the small and medium-scale mining sector has been growing in size and capitalization, both collectively and individually, it would do miners well to take note of the foregoing anecdote. (WD)