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Interview: Mining & Developing World: Barrick Gold's Porgera Gold Mine in Papua New Guinea

by Sakura Saunders (interview) (sakura at corpwatch dot org)
Interview with David Martinez, a journalist who traveled to Papua New Guinea to investigate the Porgera Gold mine. He describes the detail behind his recent feature for CorpWatch, about how the mine has changed the lives and landscape of Papua New Guinea, an island known for its rich diversity of indigenous cultures and wildlife.
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This interview corresponds to a feature article originally published on CorpWatch.org, a corporate watchdog journalist organization. David Martinez is a filmmaker and journalist based in San Francisco. (below is the actual article)

Porgera Gold Mine Transforms Pacific Island

The giant yellow trucks lumbered on six-foot high tires to the cliff's edge. The driver, in a cabin high above the ground, raised the 200-ton beds and released a massive slide of rock and mud debris hauled from the Porgera gold mine. Big muddy bulldozers, the size of a small house, emerged from the evening cloud cover to push more dirt into the valley below.

And so it goes all day every day in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. After 14 years, the mine waste has slowly torn the hills from under the local inhabitants and turned the small valley below, an extension of the Porgera Valley, into a choked river of dirt creeping toward the Coral Sea a thousand miles away.

The destruction is fueled by gold. Mining for gold is one of the world's most grotesque industries, consuming vast resources and producing mountains of waste to produce a small amount of soft, pliable metal with few practical uses. To make one gold wedding band, at least 20 tons of earth must be excavated.

The Last Great Place

Papua New Guinea, one of the world's largest island, has fortunes in gold under its lush green mountains. Called the "Last Great Place," it is home to hundreds of unique species of animals and plants from tree kangaroos to orchids of unearthly beauty, as well as to upward of 820 languages. It is the closest thing you may ever see to paradise: forested mountains surrounded by shining South Pacific seas, where clean water springs from rich volcanic soil. And that makes the poverty of its inhabitants and the destruction of its ecology all the more heartbreaking.

The Porgera valley is a microcosm of the kind of poorly regulated exploitation that marks extractive industries around the globe. The 5,600 acre open-pit complex called the Porgera gold mine is in Enga, the highest and most rugged province in Papua. It produces around 635,000 ounces of gold per year, according to Barrick Gold, a Canadian corporation that assumed a majority share of the mine in 2006. Barrick is no stranger to mining or to controversy: It operates no fewer than 26 mines worldwide, posted a profit of $1 billion in the first nine months of 2006, and boasts of having the industry's largest reserves.

In addition to Porgera, Barrick runs the Pasqua Lama mine in Alto de Carmen, Chile, currently the target of a campaign that shut down the road to the mine for a week in January of 2006.

These mines are part of what the United Nations Industrial Development Organizations calls a "gold rush in the Third World" that began in the 1980s. With demand 50 percent higher worldwide than supply, the industry is likely to be profitable for years to come. As Papua New Guinea's biggest gold mine, Porgera is part of an extractive industries megalith that includes oil and copper, and accounts for 72 percent of the country's export earnings.

The mine at Porgera is far from the famous Sebastian Salgado images of thousands of Brazilian workers slaving away by hand in a giant mud pit. It is a state-of-the-art, high-end operation utilizing the most advanced extraction technologies and helicoptering people and gold in and out on a daily basis. But like its low-tech counterparts, its extraction process creates cyanide-laced waste-water that the company discharges directly into the local river system. Only one microgram (one millionth of a gram) of cyanide in a liter of water can kill the fish. Because Porgera is literally at the top of the country, the streams into which the toxins are dumped flow into many other tributaries before they reach the sea.

The mines have also affected Porgera's human ecology, propelling the local population out of the stone age in a single generation. The Ipili had the misfortune of living on top of a lot of gold. Known for their fighting abilities (every male over 12 carries a hand-axe or a machete-like bush knife), they were also proud of their shrewd bargaining skills. Thus, when Placer Dome (later taken over by Barrick Gold), one of the biggest Canadian mining companies, came to the region proposing to open a mine, the Ipili went to the negotiating table with gusto.

Anthropologist Alex Golub lived for three years in Porgera while writing a dissertation on the relations between the Ipili and the mine. He told the story this way: "They told Placer: 'We want a high school, we want a hospital, we want long-term economic development, we want a road, we want an airstrip, and we want a town to be built. If you agree to this, you will have your mine. If you open a mine without our permission, we will kill you.' "

The agreement that was reached between the locals and the company was hailed as a landmark deal because up to that point landowners had seldom if ever been involved in negotiations at all. Porgera Joint Venture (PJV) company, the entity that Placer Dome created to run the mine, would pay the Porgerans for the use of their land, pay dividends to the families of the original landowners based upon how much gold was mined, and build a school and other buildings for the town.

According to an article in the Ottawa Citizen, the company also handed out large amounts of money. In 2006 the landowners received more than $8 million in compensation, and to date more than $30 million has been spent on development projects in Porgera, on top of $380 million in taxes and royalties to the Papua New Guinea government.

"[T]he Porgera operation really works when it comes to providing benefits to local people," PJV general manager Phil Stephenson told the Papua New Guinea Post-Courier. "It is constructive partnerships such as this that go a long way towards continuing to build both the national economy and local infrastructure, and I know that workers at the mine feel very proud to be involved when they hear of such benefits."

But it didn't last forever. Things ran relatively well until the early 1990s when the most accessible veins of ore were depleted. It was then that the company turned to open pit mining, began blasting away the hills, used cyanide and other toxins to leach gold from the rubble, and dumped the poison waste into the local streams.
read more at http://corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14381
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Transcriptions of interviews with people from Papua New Guinea: landowners, mine workers, women and human rights advocates. This report was presented to the Canadian Government, during the November 2006 round tables on Extractive Industries and the Developing World.
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