From: Bloomberg
Sept. 18 (Bloomberg) -- Peru will seek to ban unregulated gold mining in the nation’s southeastern rainforest, Environment Minister Antonio Brack said.
The Environment Ministry aims to reach an agreement with national and regional governments to halt gold panning and dredges that pollute 5 million hectares (12 million acres) in the Madre de Dios region of the Amazon River basin, Brack said yesterday in a telephone interview.
“Informal mining, which doesn’t meet minimal environmental standards, is the country’s biggest social and ecological problem,” Brack said. “These operations, which are spreading across the Andes and the Amazon, have an enormous impact on biodiversity and native communities.”
The area along Peru’s border with Bolivia and Brazil accounted for about 10 percent of Peru’s 180 metric tons of gold output last year. Workers on about 1,545 gold mining claims dump an estimated 32 tons of mercury in jungle rivers every year, polluting areas up to 500 kilometers (300 miles) away in Brazil, he said. Mercury is a toxic metal used to separate gold ore from rock.
He didn’t say how the government planned to finance monitoring in the area, a remote region the size of Belgium.
Peru is the world’s fifth-largest gold producer, with $5.6 billion in exports of the metal last year, the country’s second-largest revenue produce