resource curse?

Across these initiatives, the guiding principle is to promote economic development that benefits everyone involved —foreign companies, host governments, as well as local communities—not to question the underlying economic and ecological value of specific mines. The expansion of mining is accepted as inevitable.

These standards are heavy with terms like “minimize,” “mitigate,” and “adequate,” as in “minimize involuntary resettlement” or “mitigate adverse impacts.” It is a rhetoric of imprecision.

After an hour of discussing the company’s plan to relocate the town outside the mining concession and transform the miners into farmers, the men became impatient, fidgeting and peering toward the door. It is no problem for a bureaucrat or consultant to linger in deliberation, but for a miner these missed working hours are pure loss: they are the difference between being able to buy food and going hungry. The miners needed to get back to work. Before leaving, however, a greybeard in the group wanted me to understand something.

I don’t imagine the miners in Essakane will remember me. Many consultants and experts pass through such mining regions, visiting the areas without ever really experiencing them. Lodging in a company’s mining camp is like gated-tourism. There is electricity, potable water, Internet and television, medical care, a gym, and food and drink in abundance. These circumstances are not lost on those outside the fences of the camp, who see how roads, water pipelines, and power plants are built, but are not extended to their villages and towns. They see that mining corporations are able to establish the conditions for modern development in under a year, while they remain trapped in a lifetime of poverty.

The growth of population, speed of transportation, proliferation of electronic gadgets and games, and delivery of electricity all depend on the expansion of mining. And yet we are ready to discuss almost any other ethics before the ethics of mining. Some view the concept as a contradiction in terms, others are alarmed that mining continues to exist at all, or simply find the topic supremely boring. We have more faith in our capacity to restrain or end violence and war than to address the ethics of mining. “A man does not advocate the sun or the moon,” wrote Orwell’s publisher, Victor Gollancz, in response to Orwell’s suggestion in The Road to Wigan Pier, his 1937 book about the poverty of coal miners, that the defects of the extractive industries might be irremediable.

If you follow the chain back to the UN’s first global environmental gathering—the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, which led to the creation of the United Nations Environment Programme—the excellent book published to accompany that conference, Only One Earth, devotes just a few pages to resource extraction. One has to go back to 1949 and the United Nations Scientific Conference on the Conservation and Utilization of Resources to find minerals and mining included as part of global environmental and development ethics.

Keenleyside was a proponent of resource interdependence, which meant careful, internationally coordinated mineral extraction, a system he viewed as essential to preventing mineral supplies from being wasted again in “the barren struggles of war.”

One outcome of mining’s omission from environmental and development ethics is that as other disciplines and sectors gradually integrated concerns about sustainability into their knowledge communities, mining engineering, mineral economics and processing, geochemistry, and other sub-disciplines associated with mining have remained static. As a result, there is less experience with the study and practice of sustainable mining than, say, forestry, agronomy, or soil ecology. There is no mining equivalent, for example, of the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies.

Only in the last decade has vocal public discourse about global resource policy emerged. The effort to build an ethics of sustainable extraction is structured around two principal concepts: transparency and corporate social responsibility. While transparency initiatives concentrate on exposing revenue transactions between the private and public sectors in extractive industry projects, corporate responsibility efforts focus on the improvement of relations between companies and communities.

No matter where you are in the world, it is hard to witness people losing their land, homes, work, or food. Essakane was not my first encounter with the conflict that occurs when a mining company takes over an area that is already inhabited by artisanal miners.

The area had been mined for at least a century, but never industrialized; the interior of Guyana still has few viable roads or bridges to cross the rivers. After their houses were burned, the miners and their families were loaded into a truck at gunpoint and taken off the mountain. The ones I met had come back a few weeks later, leaving their families in the savannah. They were sleeping in hammocks pitched under tarps. “They used self-loading rifles,” a miner told me. He was smoking tobacco rolled in notebook paper. “They even burned our gardens.” The force used to clear the area was in preparation for a mine that did not yet exist. At the time, the company had only a skeletal staff on the site, led by a local Guyanese manager who was from a savannah town. He told me the houses had been destroyed but denied any personal involvement. A few days later he tracked me down in a different village. “I wanted you to know that I did it,” he admitted. “It was wrong to burn their houses.” But when I met the company’s expatriate director in Guyana’s capital, Georgetown, he insisted no incident had occurred. Even if it had, he told me, I needed to understand that it was inaccurate to equate thatched-roof dwellings with houses made of concrete and metal. In his words, “There are houses, and there are houses.” Later, when I met with the Canadian High Commissioner in charge of the consulate in Georgetown, he tried to persuade me that I had convinced myself that this violence against the miners had occurred. I offered to show him film and photographs from the field, but he said he was out of time and walked me to the door.

Guyana and Burkina Faso are hardly isolated instances. It is hard to identify a part of the world where resource extraction is expanding without conflict. There are the more well-known conflicts—for instance, the massacre of striking miners in South Africa in August 2012. But not two weeks before that massacre five people were killed by security forces at an iron mine in Guinea. (The company opening that mine has since withdrawn from Guinea altogether.)

The first time I visited a tailings pond, where mines store the toxic waste that results from processing ore, I mistook it for a lake. The waste consumed a valley, nearly overflowing its dam. What is often difficult to grasp is that having taken this step there is no going back. A pit filled with toxic compounds does not merely revert to ecological equilibrium, it must be managed forever. A modern industrial mine is complete inversion: the earth turned upside down. Waste piles form new mountains, open pits become ravines.

For a decade now mining companies have been driving up the price of gold. The force beneath the bubble is the emergence of exchange-traded funds, a mechanism for selling gold as a mass investment by dividing bars into securities that can be traded on major stock exchanges.

China’s ascent as a global mining power has been the big story of resource relations for several years now. What most observers had anticipated, however was a competition between industrial state-owned enterprises and Western corporations, and that the presence of China might embolden host countries to nationalize their resources, knowing they could then turn to the Chinese for a better deal. I don’t know of anybody who predicted that a consequence of the rising price of gold would be Chinese miners mechanizing and infiltrating the artisanal mining sector in places such as Ghana.

The villages I visited in Ghana were enduring systematic abuse at the hands of the Chinese. Their farms had been bulldozed and moats dug around them to restrict access.

Outrage was boiling over. In village meetings, men pointed, yelled, and lunged at each other, fighting over who was to blame for permitting entry to the Chinese. “They are arguing about the chiefs,” Gavin Hilson, an expert on Ghana’s mining economy and Chair of Sustainability in Business at the University of Surrey, explained to me. One particularity of local custom is that it is not permitted to speak a bad word about a tribal chief. But land is allocated through the paramount chief, or Omanhene, and the hierarchy of sub-chiefs operating under the Ashanti King. “The Chinese could not be there unless they had the support of the chiefs,” Hilson said.

Artificially inflating the price of gold was meant to prolong the lifetime of corporate mining operations, which are confronting diminishing grades and rising costs of energy and materials. Those implementing this strategy did not consider the effect it would have on local communities and the artisanal mining economy, or anticipate the invention of new forms of mining taking advantage of the record price of gold. Whether in Burkina Faso, Guyana, or Ghana, the thread connecting these conflicts is not merely a deficit of transparency or a need for more corporate social responsibility. It is, fundamentally, a problem of scarcity. A sane mining ethic would establish limits on prolonging extraction once the grade reaches an unsustainable level in an area, rather than continuing to expand as if the resource were infinite. Setting these limits would require interfering, as Dr. Keenleyside suggested more than sixty years ago, “with the free play of a market that is interested primarily in profits.” Such interference, improbable then, is unimaginable now. Instead, the investor bubble driving this gold rush will stubbornly persist, while the ethics of mining remain nowhere to be found.

Hold to account companies and individuals through sanctions trafficking in minerals, whether with rebel groups or neighbouring countries, particularly Rwanda and Uganda. Canada has chimed in as well but has been deadly silent on the exploitative practices of its mining companies in the Congo. Canada must do more to hold its mining companies accountable as is called for in Bill C-300.