Twenty-One Reasons Why not to Mine in Ecuador’s Intag Forests
DECOIN has been actively working with communities since 1995 to stop large-scale mining development in Ecuador’s northwestern region. We are a grass-roots environmental organization, whose members live and work in the area we are trying to protect. For our work to keep Intag free of large-scale mines, plus our creative and every effective conservation work, which includes the creation of 38 community-owned forest and watershed reserves, the United Nations awarded us the prestigious 2017 Equator Prize. These community-owned reserves are conserving close to 13,000 hectares of forests and endangered species, and the protected watersheds are providing clean water to thousand of Intag’s residents.
Our most pressing work is, after all these years, stopping a large-scale mining project which threatens to devastate primary forests and pristine watersheds, which harbor over 200 species facing extinction, and at least two that live here and nowhere else in the work.
Besides outright buying forests for communities and local governments, our work also includes biological investigation (see below section on frogs); legal remedies (we currently are working on a Constitutional Injunction) , environmental education at all levels, including high/school and elementary grade kids; supporting sustainable activities, such as ecological tourism. For more details, please contact us at [email protected].
Mining
It is extremely difficult for most persons to envision the social and environmental impacts a large-scale metal mining project would generate in Ecuador’s diverse and biodiverse ecosystems. Most of you have never seen what an open-pit mine looks like, nor heard of the lasting effects of Acid Mine Drainage. Even fewer will know that it takes, on average, over a ton of ore to produce one gram of gold, and that large mining companies can extract, crush and process hundreds of thousands tons of mineralized subsoil (ore) per day. Very few will have learned about the forced displacement of communities, or the hundreds of conflicts, gross human rights abuses and violence these mines generate. Nor will you likely know that it takes million gallons of water and a toxic brew of chemicals to extract the grams of gold or pounds of copper and other minerals that one ton of ore may hold.
Mining is damaging enough in deserts and semi-arid places where, for example, most of the copper comes from, but it is exceedingly socially and environmentally destructive in places like Ecuador for the reasons listed below.
Most of the impacts you are about to read about are largely based on a technical report commissioned by the Japan International Cooperation Agency for a small open-pit copper mine in the biodiverse Toisan Range, in Northwest Ecuador. The Study was done by the Japan Minerals and Mining Agency. Unlike most Environmental Impact Studies (EIAS), which are paid for and often edited by mining companies, this preliminary EIA was paid by Japanese public funds- making it the only one in Ecuador which presents a more realistic picture of the impacts generated by a large-scale open pit mine in Ecuadorian ecosystems.
IMPACTS
- Impacts directly below are based on a proposed 72 million ton ore deposit containing 0.7% copper, 0.003% molybdenum, plus arsenic, lead, cadmium, chrome and other toxic substances. A year later, the Japanese exploring the site inferred, a five times larger ore deposit (The latest (April 2019) unofficial estimates reported on the press is a ore deposit 50 times larger than this).
- Relocation of communities. Unlike mining districts in Chile’s Atacama Desert or those in the arid regions of Australia and the U.S. Southwest, the Intag region, where the copper mining project is being proposed, is extremely biodiverse. There are also dozens of small, rural communities and hundreds of landowners within the minign concessions. It is also a place especially rich in rivers and streams. According to the Japanese Study, the mining project would relocate hundreds of families from four communities. Afterwards, the Japanese found more five times more copper, which will increase the number of communities affected. Relocation of communities almost always invariably leads to human rights abuses, and often leave the relocated community members financially and socially worse off (The much larger April 2019 estimates imply the relocation of several more communities).
2. The proposed mining project would impact primary cloud forests. What’s so special about cloud forests? Less than 2.5% of the world’s tropical forests are cloud forests. They are not only exceptionally biologically diverse- as well as severely threatened- but play an outsize role in protecting headwater watersheds, thus preventing silting and downstream flooding. Millions of Ecuadorians depend on protected watersheds for their daily water needs.
- The project would cause massive deforestation (in the words of the experts preparing the Study). The small mine would directly impact 4,025 hectares directly.
- The deforestation, according to the Japanese, would lead to drying of local climate, affecting thousands of small farmers (the EIA used the word desertification).
- Intag’s forests belong to the world’s top Biodiversity Hotspot; the Tropical Andes. The scientist working on the study in 1996 identified 12 species of mammals and birds facing extinction that would be impacted by the project, including jaguars, spectacled bears, mountain tapirs and the brown-faced spider monkey. Based on a 2017 in depth study by biologist Bitty Roy and others, eight critically endangered species, 37 endangered species, 153 vulnerable, 89 near threatened, as well as numerous other less threatened species were identified within Intag and adjacent forests (https://bit.ly/2ORqcvV). The list includes two critically endangered primates (Brown-Headed Spider Monkey and White-Fronted Capuchin). Another species of note was the Longnose Harlequin frog, which was considered extinct until it was recently discovered within the Llurimagua mining concession owned by CODELCO of Chile.
UPDATE, January 2019
As of this writing (April 7, 2019) Codelco is in the process, through its Ecuadorian mining partner, ENAMI, of asking permission from the Ecuadorian government to expand its exploratory activities 701 hectares. This new forest is no less biodiverse than the previous forest Codelco and Enami thrashed. In fact, biologist investigating the new site reported finding two critically endangered species: the Brown-faced Spider Monkey and Lynch’s Giant Glass Frog . If it receives government approval, the expansion will impact primary and secondary cloud forests, several other animals facing extinction, plus impact an important archaeological site (based on information taken from the Environmental Impact Study), not to mention dozens of primary micro watersheds and the Junin River.
Two Extinct Species Rediscovered
On March 2016, biologist from the JAMBATU CENTER reported finding the Longnose Harlequin Frog (Atelopus longirostris) in a forest threatened by the mining project (http://bit.ly/2x7fFlV). Previously, it was listed as extinct on the IUCN Red List.
As important as this finding is, on Septemeber of 2019, the same foundation discovered an even rarer frog; the Confusing Rocke Frog (Ectopoglossus confusus). The frog was also considered extinct until the recent finding (the finding is so recent that it has not been reported officially). This forest now constitutes the only place on Earth where these critically endangered species survive in the wild. In addition, the area has several other endemic species, such as the recently discovered Shape-shifting frog (Pristimantis mutabilis), and the Black-breasted Puffleg Hummingbird, which exists in only two patches of high altitude cloud forests- one of them located in Intag. But this is only the tip of the iceberg.
6. There are dozens of pristine rivers and streams within the concession; not an uncommon phenomenon in the Andes. The EIA predicted they would be contaminated with lead, arsenic, chromium, cadmium and other toxic substances; in some cases, to over 10,000% over natural levels.
- The study identified several pre-Incan archeological sites within the mining area. Mining would, unquestionably, destroy these national treasures.
8. The 1996 study also highlighted the fact that it would impact the Cotacachi-Capayas Ecological Reserve (one of the world’s most biologically diverse protected areas and the only one of any significant size in all of western Ecuador).
Besides these very worrying impacts identified identified in the Study (for a mine a fraction of what it could very likely end up being)… there are other significant problems with mining in areas like Intag.
B. Legal hassles
9. Large-scale mining would violate local laws, such as the legally-binding Cotacachi County Ecological Ordinance created in 2000. Only the Constitutional Tribunal can rule on the validity of the Ordinance in light of the new Constitution. And the Tribunal has not.
10. Ecuador’s new Constitution demands that communities be consulted before any project impacting their social or natural environment takes place; a Constitutional guarantee that has been disregarded from the first day the government tried violently to impose the mining project in Intag in 2014. The Constitution also grants nature rights, and the people right to Sumak Kawsay, or a Good Life (also translatable as Harmonious Life). Just because a government does its best to distort the Constitution does not mean a future one will do the same.
A Damming Investigation
In March of 2019, the nation’s Comptroller General released the results of a year-long investigation into the Llurimagua mining project (https://bit.ly/2TDvQSX). The report meticulously detailed grievous violations of laws, regulations and the environmental license, which, according to the author of the report, should have led to the suspension of the project. The information contained in the 84 page report lends itself to present several lawsuits to stop the mining project, plus it ratifies without any doubt, just how impossible it is to do responsible mining in Ecuador.
Political Scenario.
11. One of the things the government likes to underline is that it has the area´s political support. In March 2019, five of Intag’s six Parish governments elected presidents of the political party identified with the anti-mining stance; including to the Parish where the Llurimagua mining project is located. These local governments are joining hands with civil society to reject mining in Intag. Moreover, in 2017, the County government approved a Resolution calling for metal mining to halt within all of its territory, including Intag, and in 2018, a County-wide Ordinance that declared all of Intag an ACUS; Area for Conservation and Sustaainble Use was passed.
C. Opposition.
There is widespread opposition to the Intag mining project. This includes:
Community Opposition. Most communities surrounding the mining project are still, after all these years, opposed to the project. Twenty-four years of resistance has honed their skill in resisting (the right to resist is now a right protected by the Constitution). In fact, on November 2013 the government tried to carry out an environmental impact study were stopped by the communities- in spite of heavy police presence, and military in the area. It was only after illegally arresting the president of JUNIN in April 2014, and storming the mining concessions with hundreds of Swat-type police units a month later that the company was able to go into the mining concessions.
14. Human Rights
Human rights abuses are an -unfortunate- shared phenomenon in most mining districts in the Andes and elsewhere. After years of stopping dozens of attempts by government and private companies of accessing the mining concession that overlap communal land in order to carry out the environmental impact study and begin exploration, Ecuador’s government and Chilean-owned Codelco only succeeded in carrying out the study in May of 2014 with the help of hundreds of police that terrorized the area for two months and violated rights, such as the right to freely circulate. To intensify the intimidation, a month earlier Javier Ramírez, president of the Junín community was arrested and jailed under highly irregular circumstances, which have been denounced by human rights organizations such as Amnesty International, and The International Human Rights Federation, as well as several national human rights groups. Javier was released after being sentenced in February of 2015 but only after serving 10 months in jail. His brother, Victor Hugo, remains in hiding accused of sabotage, the same criminal offense as his brother, for putting up resistance to the presence of mining employees in their territory.
14. As the rest of Ecuador, local organizations oppose mining once they find out its real impact. In the Intag region, 90% of NGO’s oppose the project. In late 2012, the most important civil society organizations in Intag wrote a letter to Chile’s president to make sure he understood that the organizations would again rise to defend the area if Codelco or anyone went ahead and tried to revive the project. .
D. Exaggerated Claims
15. It is common for companies to exaggerate the resources they hold in their mining concessions, in order to raise capital with investment firms, or stock exchanges. The Junin project was no different. In 2007, for example, Micon International, the entity contracted by Ascendant Copper to evaluate the Junin copper deposit, said that it could not confirm their earlier estimates due to degradation of samples. Copper Mesa had claimed that the Junin copper deposit had four times more copper than what the Japanese inferred after years of exploration. In all, 2.26 million tons were inferred by the Japanese, which is a little less than 1/10th of what the world consumes annually (and it would take decades to mine it all out). Regarding more recent information (2018) various estimates have been floated around; from 1,500 million tons of ore, to the 2.26 million tons the Japanese originally inferred, to the aforementioned 3.8 billion tons mentioned by the press in March of 2019. Wild numbers usually indicate speculators behind them. In any case, the deposit has not gone beyond a inferred status; making for a lot of uncertainty to the project.
E. Further environmental challenges
- Most of Ecuador’s mining concessions are situated in mountainous regions, like the Toisan Range. This area gets between 3000 and 4000 millimeters of annual rainfall ( 120 to 150 inches). Heavy rainfall, together with abundant underground aquifers, and heavy metals in the ore make for a deadly mix. Not only that, but they raise the price of mining considerably, while greatly increasing the risks of man-made disasters, such as landslides. For an idea of what a landslide can do in an open pit mine, go here:
17. Acid Mine Drainage is a chemical phenomenon almost impossible to control. It happens when sulfur compounds in mining ore and waste rock come into contact with air and water. The sulfur acidifies the water, which then leaches heavy metals from used-up ores, plus the equally contaminated subsoil lying between the ground level and the ore. Once started, it may take thousands of years for the acidity to be neutralized. Most ores in South America has sulfur compounds mixed in with the gold, copper and other metals sought by companies.
18. In sites like where the Junin mine is being proposed, there is a superabundance of underground water (according to Japanese EIA). This is bad news for mining companies and even worse news for the environment. In order to dig large pits to dig out the ore, streams and aquifers must be diverted or dried up so the mine-pit does not fill up with water. If the water is pumped from the inside the pit, as will be inevitable given the high rainfall and seepage, the water will likely be contaminated with heavy metals as a result of Acid Mine Drainage.
19. The area where they found the copper is exceptionally steep and mountainous, making mining much more difficult and expensive than most mines (the latest Environmental Impact Statement for the expansion of exploratory activities, made public on January 2019, highlights this risk).
20. Based on the Japanese study, there are clear indications that Junín’s copper is very deep, making mining much more environmentally destructive and economically risky.
21. The Toisan Range, and the Andes in general, have many geological faults, posing significant earthquake risks. In fact the 2019 EIA, classifies the area as being located in an area substantially at risk of a major earthquake within 10 years.
There are, in fact, many more than 21 reasons for mining not to be allowed in areas like Intag’s. But these should suffice for any company that considers itself responsible and to realize that Intag’s forests and inhabitants should be a no go zone.
In the end, if companies like Codelco go ahead with mining in areas like Intag- the mines will go down in history as being some of the world’s greatest environmental disasters. We must act, and do so now!
Compiled by Carlos Zorrilla
Defensa y Conservación Ecológica de Intag
DECOIN Winner of the 2017 United Nations Equator Initiative Prize for Conservation
[email protected] [email protected]
** Videos about Intag’s Struggle
Further Reading
Basic background on mining impacts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_mining
More detailed information: https://www.elaw.org/files/mining-eia-guidebook/Chapter1.pdf
