30 de September 2010 – Buenos Aires. Argentina’s Senate worked until sunrise this morning to vote one of the world’s first National Glacier Protection Acts despite intense lobby from the mining sector against the bill. The law now goes to the President, who despite having vetoed a weaker version of the bill in 2008, says she’ll sign this one into law.
If found to impact or destroy Glaciers multinational mining companies could be forced to leave Argentina, once a haven for lucrative mining profits. Argentina is expected to bow to emerging environmental concerns and calls for leaving economic benefits of mining at home, reversing liberal mining benefits granted in the 1990s.
Article 1 of the National Glacier Act, “establishes the minimum standards for the protection of glaciers and periglaciers with the objective of protecting them as strategic freshwater reserves for human consumption; for agriculture and as sources of water-basin refill; for the protection of biodiversity; for their scientific informational value and as a tourist attraction.”
Climate change has been affecting glaciers worldwide, many of which are receding due to rising mean temperatures, however in Argentine, concern over glacier melt is heightened as new largescale mining projects are accelerating this trend by soiling glaciers and pushing down their melting points due to greater sun absorption, placing some of Argentina’s most arid lands at enormous environmental risk. The debate over the glacier bill has taken nearly three years and the crux of the matter was not so much about Glaciers but rather, mostly about irresponsible mining and how it is placing Argentina’s glaciers at risk.
Gerardo Morales, Senator from Jujuy where large international mining companies like Soltera, Dajin, and others are flocking to extract gold and other minerals in large quantities, fired at the mining lobby at the Senate session, accusing several of the mining province governors and mining companies of consistently lying about their compliance with environmental norms and offering empty promises of supposed Corporate Social Responsibility. “And even if we wanted to control these guys, we only have 5 people in our Environment Secretariat … its impossible”, said Morales.
Beder Herrera, Governor of La Rioja, has accused companies like Barrick Gold of striking draconian and illegitimate deals with corrupt governments in Argentina, and milking local coffers of all mining benefits. Herrera claims that the mining lobby wields enormous amounts of money and uses it to buy votes in Congress dictating executive policy.
Ironically Herrera is staunchly pro-mining and loathed by the NGO community for his tactics and lack of transparency. But he is set on changing the economic rules for international mining companies wanting to do business in Argentina, to capture some of their savory profits for homegrown business.
One of the most contentions projects in Argentina that has riled up much opposition due specifically to its impacts on glaciers is Barrick Gold’s Pascua Lama project, straddling the Argentine-Chilean border, which originally intended to blow up glaciers to get at precious metal reserves underneath the packed ice. The image below is from a brochure put out some time ago by the Canadian mining giant showing how it intended to destroy several glaciers and move them to new sites by dump trucks. Such disregard for Argentina’s glaciers could no longer occur under the new national glacier law, in fact Pascua Lama or Veladero could probably never happen again in Argentina with the new law.
A new liberal mining law in the 90s ushered in an era of new multinational investment in Argentina, that is targeting rich mineral deposits in a gold belt along the Andes, which happens also to be home to many of Argentina’s most important ice cover. Yet Senators yesterday from both camps showed much disdain with the 1990s national mining law which gives away over 97% of all profits to the mining companies, and eliminates nearly all taxes of all types. Several Senators announced intensions to initiate a process to reform Argentina’s mining code, which is what the environmental community has been calling for. This would put a serious damper on Mining Secretary Jorge Mayoral’s plans which was to catapult Argentina to the heights of the mining world. Mayoral visited the Senate three days ago calling for them to vote the more lax version of the law. He failed. Mayoral’s vision of expanding mining in the Andes received a serious blow yesterday, beginning with the glacier law as well as with the announcement of the Senate’s intensions to eliminate lucrative tax havens that Argentina offers the mining sector today. That’s what brought all the mining investment in the first place.
The new Glacier Act will now greatly limit all industrial activity anywhere near glaciers, which is a point the mining lobby that had leveraged the Presidential veto of the first glacier bill in 2008 tried to derail by securing a less stringent version of the approved law, which was narrowly rejected last night by legislators. To get at gold and other precious metals found along the Andes, you pretty much have to destroy ice, much of which is in glacier form. The new law not only protects “glaciers” but also covers a very broad definition of what is considered to be a glacier, which is: “all perennial stable or free slow-flowing ice mass … located in different ecosystems, whatever its form, dimension and state of conservation.”
The law also protects peri-glaciers considered frozen environments near glaciers or parts of glacier ecosystems, in high, mid and low mountains, which basically keeps miners away from much of the lucrative terrain they are now perforating incessantly to search for precious metals. One Senator likened what the mining sector is leaving in the Andes to “one huge colander”. This means that mining occurring anywhere near glaciers, such as Barrick’s projects, but also in other largescale international mining prospects now underway, could possibly be ruled illegal.
Article 6 of the law is one of the most contentious sections of the law and miners are already coming out in droves to disapprove of the newly enacted and far reaching environmental protection norm. Fiercely resisted by the mining lobby, Article 6 relates to “Prohibited Activities” which includes activities “which could affect [glaciers’] natural condition … which could imply their destruction or movement, or that interfere in their advance.
And yes, “mining” as well as “hydrocarbon” industries are prohibited. Others include “the release, dispersion or deposit of substances, [or] contaminating elements, chemical products or residue of any nature or volume”. If the law voted today had existed when Barrick launched Pascua Lama, these projects might never have gotten beyond the prospecting phase. Now dozens of pending international projects, including the likes of Las Flechas (Tenke/Deprominsa), El Pachón (Xstrata), Vicuña (Suramina), surrounding one of Argentina’s largest glaciers, like El Potro shared between San Juan, La Rioja and Chile, will surely run into problems with the new glacier act.
The mining lobby was able to gain one important concession, which was the elimination of former Article 17, which would have suspended new projects until the glacier inventory (which is also called for by the law) in complete. That could have frozen most pending projects for up to 6 months, and maybe even years.
Yet another article, Article 15 is also causing alarm in the mining sector, as existing mining companies that operate near or on glaciers will have to submit within 180 days to an audit which will identify and quantify impacts to glaciers. Some estimate for example, that Barrick has already destroyed some 60% of the glaciers in the vicinity of Pascua Lama. If the audit confirms such destruction, the company could be forced to cease operations entirely or move to another location, which would kill the investment altogether, since the gold is under the glacier!
Fortunately, Argentina now has a glacier law which will throw a wrench into irresponsible mining.
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Daniel Taillant