- by Marcus Browning
- The Guardian
- Issue #2130
The village of Bento Rodrigues after the disaster. Photo: Rogério Alves/TV Senado – flickr.com (CC BY 2.0)
“Rio-Glencore merger would create a copper powerhouse” ran a headline in the Sydney Morning Herald on 17 January, trumpeting yet another triumph in the drive by resources giants to global monopoly. The creation of a “mining superpower” as hailed in the article is no exaggeration. Their unprecedented power to plunder nature’s mineral wealth represents the contradiction threatening the destruction of the environment: extracting infinite profits from the finite earth.
Last October, Australian transnational mining corporation BHP and its Brazilian offshoot, Vale, reached a $45 billion settlement with authorities in Brazil to compensate the country for the collapse of a massive waste dam at an iron ore mine in 2015.
Under the agreement, Samarco – a joint venture between BHP and Vale – are to pay the compensation over 20 years.
The collapse of the dam at the iron ore mine, near the city of Mariana in south-eastern Brazil, unleashed a wave of tailings in a disaster that killed 19 people, left hundreds homeless, flooded forests, and polluted the length of the Doce River. It was one of the country’s worst environmental disasters.
The collapse of the dam unleashed a torrent of over 40 million cubic metres of highly toxic mining waste sludge, enough to fill 12,000 Olympic swimming pools.
The ochre-coloured muck from the dam in the town of Mariana flooded a dozen downstream villages in Minas Gerais state. We need not look far back past the Brazil disaster, its environmental destruction and devastating effect on Indigenous communities to see the pattern of destruction in the mining corporations’ insatiable demand for profit.
In 2013 Papua New Guinea’s huge Ok Tedi gold and copper mine became synonymous with environmental disaster.
BHP and the Australian federal government came out swinging in response to suggestions that control of a fund – set up to save face over the Ok Tedi mine environmental disaster – should be put in the hands of the Papua New Guinea government.
The story hit the front pages when it was announced outgoing Ok Tedi chairman, the multi-functional Ross Garnaut, had been banned from entering PNG after comments he made in a newspaper interview cast doubt on the trustworthiness of PNG authorities to carry out such a function.
The name Ok Tedi would be familiar to many Australians. BHP took over control of the copper mine in PNG’s Western Province in the 1980s. Reports of major pollution from the mine had been hitting the media for some time before a report in 1999 finally spilled all the beans. Chemicals from the tailings had contaminated fish and poisoned the water source for 50,000 Indigenous people living in the villages downstream from the mine. Food crops were also contaminated.
BHP wanted out. World copper prices were low and the Ok Tedi operation was a public relations disaster. The “Big Australian” (as BHP was known at the time) set up the PNG Sustainable Development Program (PNGSDP) in 2002 to collect income from the ongoing mining operation and hold it in trust for remediation and further investment in PNG.
The public conscience was massaged and it was off to more profitable ventures! BHP maintain a veto on decisions of the fund’s board and – until recently – the “right” to appoint 3 of the 7 board members from the company’s HQ in Melbourne. The mining transnational was supposedly sorry about its disastrous environmental legacy but not that sorry.
There is another twist to the story. Copper prices have surged in recent times and, rather than winding down, Ok Tedi might actually be expanding. The monies sitting in the PNGSDP are considerable and long-term reserves are projected to hit $3.7 billion by 2022. Not surprisingly, the PNG government would like to access some of those locked away funds for cash-starved development projects.
BHP enraged PNG prime minister, Peter O’Neill, by accusing him of blocking the granting of exploration licences to the mining mega-corporation until control of PNGSDP is ceded to his government.
O’Neill was quoted as saying that BHP must drop its “colonial era mentality” and talk about “ending a role there can be no justification for its continuing to play.” He vigorously denied any improper role in dealings with BHP or damaging the investment climate in PNG.
“Last month I addressed 1,400 mining and oil and gas leaders, and financiers in Sydney at the annual PNG Mining and Petroleum Conference. The claim that this issue has undermined confidence could not be further from the truth,” O’Neill said.
The business pages rallied to the side of BHP Billiton and the federal government. They claimed that PNG has a reputation internationally for corrupt government. Just to prove it the Australian Financial Review quoted an unnamed “industry source” who is concerned PNG will “… end up like Nigeria.” The visa ban on Garnaut was “intemperate and outrageous.” The PNG’s actions were a “serious infringement of free speech.”
Racist attempts by the corporate media to portray mining plunderers as thanklessly bearing the “white man’s burden” are not new and continue today as Australian governments continue to try and lord it over Pacific Island nations. The peoples of the region are rejecting the paternalistic arrogance of successive Australian governments and the corporate interests they promote with foreign policy in the region.
