RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) – Brazil’s mining lobby group asked the country’s foreign ministry to work with other governments to improve tactics used to combat the illegal gold trade, it said on Friday.
“The trade of illegal gold feeds a criminal alliance in Brazil, which is responsible for part of the devastation we see in the Amazon rainforest, something the world is watching,” said Raul Jungmann, president of the Ibram trade association, in a statement.
Unregulated mining, which surged under right-wing former President Jair Bolsonaro, has destroyed rainforest land and polluted rivers with deadly mercury, while illegal miners have clashed violently with indigenous groups protecting their land.
But even legal mining is at an industrial scale spurring deforestation as once-impenetrable forest is cleared for access roads and mines for gold, iron and coal.
Ibram represents mining giants such as Vale, Rio Tinto, BHP as well as gold miners such as South Africa’s AngloGold Ashanti and Canada’s Yamana Gold The lobby group called for the ministry to work with countries that buy illegally mined Brazilian gold, such as Switzerland, to “reduce the space” for illicit operators. Ibram asked the ministry to help an August conference on “bioeconomy” in the Amazon, which is set to be a forum to formulate long-term plans for sustainable development. “It would be a strategy to signal to Brazil and the world that concrete actions are being taken to recover this important biome and outline a future based on good sustainability practices”, said Jungmann. The new administration of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has revoked some of Bolsonaro’s policies that eased off environmental protections. It has pledged to stop deforestation in the Amazon, a vital biome whose health is considered vital in the fight against climate change.
(Reporting by Marta Nogueira; Editing by David Gregorio)
