POLICY Forum Guyana (PFG) last week commenced the systematic phase of its campaign to protect Guyana’s rivers from the devastation of mining pollution with a training workshop in Kamarang, Upper Mazaruni.

Launched last July with a rally, ‘Keep the Rivers Alive’, the campaign aims to monitor river pollution due to mining.

In a release, the PFG noted that based on water monitoring techniques developed by the Global Rivers Environmental Education Network (GREEN), young people from in the Mazaruni communities of Paruima, Waramadong, Kako, Kamarang, Jawalla and Imbaimadai will be enabled to develop plans to protect water quality on a sustainable basis.

The PFG urged that action at both community and national levels is needed to shield Guyana’s once-pristine major rivers from the effects of mining. Seen from the air, long stretches of the Potaro, Cuyuni, Mazaruni and Puruni rivers have been reduced to chains of toxic, sediment-choked muddy pools winding through a blighted landscape.

“Strengthening community capacity to combat the negative effects of mining pollution is, however, utterly inadequate without national regulatory and policy frameworks purposefully countering the decades of regulatory abuses ramped up by widespread mechanised mining,” the release said.

According to PFG, traditional small scale, unmechanised mining has largely been rendered obsolete, other than ‘punting’ in the indigenous communities.

Earlier this week, The Lancet, one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world, in a major report entitled “The Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health” states that “Pollution is the largest environmental cause of disease and premature death in the world today”, making specific mention of “mines, and hazardous waste sites… polluted by toxic chemicals, radionuclides, and heavy metals released into air, water, and soil.”

Opposition of powerful vested interests in gold mining has been a perennial barrier to control of pollution, exerting disproportionate influence on mining officials, resisting imposition of effective regulation, tax evasion, manufacturing doubt about the effectiveness of interventions and paralysing Government efforts to impose realistic cost recovery measures.

The PFG stressed that developing and industrialising countries can apply control to avoid many of the harmful consequences of pollution—to leapfrog over the worst of the human and ecological disasters that have plagued industrial development in the past—and to improve human health and well-being.

“Every dollar invested in control of ambient air pollution in the USA since passage of the Clean Air Act in 1970, for example, is estimated to yield US$30 in economic benefits.” the PFG added.

The policy forum added that these interests resist the conclusion – proven across the developed world — that pollution is an avoidable consequence of economic development.
As pointed out in the Lancet study, “many pollution control strategies that have proven cost-effective in high-income and middle-income countries can be exported and adapted by cities and countries at every level of income”.

Whatever forms the Green State Development Strategy may adopt, the non-negotiable nature of environmental standards applicable, for example, to freshwater in Guyana has to be sustained, the PFG said.

“It speaks volumes, for example, that neither side in the growing confrontation between the Rupununi Miners Association and the Ministry of Natural Resources over access to the Marudi Mountains has sought to reference protection of rivers threatened by the expansion of such mining.

“Any solution to this dispute not accompanied by enforceable environmental guarantees will inevitably see the poisoned fate of the rivers of central and western Guyana spread to the upper reaches of the Essequibo and Rewa rivers in the South Rupununi” it added.