Advance in mining makes mining seek sustainable label – 07/19/2023 – Environment

Environmental disasters, international pressure and the advance of illegal mining under the Bolsonaro government led the Brazilian mineral sector to seek over the last year to reposition its image to incorporate a label of good sustainability practices.

If for critics the expression “sustainable mining” is nothing more than an oxymoron —a contradiction in terms—, the union of the country’s big mining companies started to adopt it as a kind of mantra.

The segment’s image had a huge negative impact, first with the Mariana tragedy in November 2015, which killed 19 people, devastated communities, displaced hundreds of families and disgraced the Doce river. Then came the Brumadinho disaster, with 270 fatalities and more human, material and environmental ruin.

In recent years, the expansion of illegal mining, boosted by the increase in the price of gold on the international market and the permissiveness of the Bolsonaro administration, have made the situation worse. Mining companies complain that society often confuses their industrial activity with that of miners outside the law.

Last but not least, the demands of the international market regarding the practices and origin of exported minerals made a change in attitude inevitable.

The image repositioning gained strength especially after the hiring, by Ibram (Brazilian Mining Institute), an entity that represents the main mining companies in the country, of Raul Jungmann as CEO.

A politician with good experience in the three branches of government in Brasilia, in business and in the Armed Forces, a former federal deputy and former minister of Agrarian Development in the Fernando Henrique Cardoso government and of Defense and Public Security in the Michel Temer government, he took office in May 2022. Since then, it has been a peddler of the ESG agenda (acronym for good environmental, social and governance practices) of the large mining companies.

Ibram brings together multinational giants such as Anglo American, Kinross and Vale itself, responsible for the Brumadinho tragedy and partner (with BHP) of Samarco, responsible for the Mariana disaster. It represents a sector that earned BRL 339 billion in 2021 and BRL 250 billion in 2022.

Jungmann says he was hired through a headhunter. During the selection process, the then vice-president of Vale Luiz Eduardo Osorio, with whom he already had good relations, entrusted him with the mission of carrying out such an image repositioning.

One of the clearest signs of the “rebranding” was the change in relation to the project to regulate mining on indigenous lands.

When the government of Jair Bolsonaro sent a project with this intention to Congress, in 2020, Ibram bluntly endorsed it. “The initiative is appropriate and should be supported by Brazilians,” wrote the then director-president of the organization, Flávio Ottoni Penido.

Last year, Bolsonaro’s base in Parliament made an offensive to approve the release, but Ibram, already chaired by Jungmann, modulated the speech, expressing reservations about the project, but leaving room to support the practice in the future.

Jungmann alleges that there was never effective support for the project, but “silence”. “It’s a very withdrawn sector, which doesn’t deal directly with the public. And which, in a way, has good positions in terms of sustainability, but it hasn’t been putting that.”

He also says that, due to a lack of communication, the importance of mining is underestimated. “Everything around you at that moment is either mineral or has been industrialized from ores. The water you drink is ore. The light, the tungsten filament, is ore. The cell phone has 14 different minerals, but nobody notices of it,” he says. “Mining only appears at the time of disaster.”

Opened in the most recent humanitarian tragedy in the Yanomami Indigenous Land, the voracity of mining outside the law in the four years of the Bolsonaro government created a strong competitor for the industry. It caused damage to revenues (according to Ibram, there are 50 tons of illegal gold per year, almost half of the little more than 100 tons produced in the country) and led the sector to support initiatives in Parliament and civil society to curb gold mining, such as the bill to regulate gold trading and replace the current “declaration of good faith” law.

Jungmann says he has already held three meetings with the Central Bank to discuss how to improve the inspection of DTVMs, institutions that operate in the commercialization with BC authorization.

Ibram also sought out the federal government and has presented itself as a partner in the fight against illegal mining in the Amazon and related projects.

A certain alignment can also be perceived in the speech. In recent months, President Lula has repeated that the Amazon cannot be seen as an “ecological sanctuary”, the same reasoning and words used recently by a Vale executive.

Other Ibram initiatives were the publication of the “Green Book of Mining”, with actions by the sector to mitigate the environmental impact and examples of mining areas adapted to new uses after closure —it informs, for example, that the lake in Ibirapuera Park and the borders of USP were sand extraction areas—, and the creation of an application with the real-time situation and the safety level of the dams.

The next card is the organization of the International Conference on the Amazon and New Economies, from August 30th to September 1st, in Belém. “We want to commit to preserving forests, respecting the preservation of lands and native peoples and nature”, says Jungmann.

South Korean Ban Ki-moon, former UN Secretary General, and Colombian President Iván Duque are among the guests. The main sponsor of the event will be Vale.

All this effort raises a question: but is there sustainable mining?

Márcio Santilli, former president of Funai and one of the founders of ISA (Instituto Socioambiental), responds with a laugh. “Mining refers to a natural wealth that is depleted. So sustainability is in terms, because you subtract something from nature forever, the natural base is exhausted over time. No matter how long the project is — a deposit can last one hundred years—what remains in place? The examples we have are not very good”, he says.

“Mining has to take care of its image, it has to obtain investments from international funds, and therefore it is essential to separate the wheat from the chaff, to differentiate itself from predatory mining, which did not happen before. money and territory”, observes Santilli.

Professor of economics at Unifesspa (Federal University of the South and Southeast of Pará), Giliad de Souza Silva follows the same path.

“By definition, mining takes resources from nature to transform them into something else. Showing that this is sustainable requires a great argumentative effort”, says Silva, one of the coordinators of the De Olho na Cfem project, which monitors the application of mining royalties in municipalities with large production.

Ibram’s change of speech, opines the professor, is a movement to “transform the investment of shareholders into a clean investment, which does not deprecate”. “For me, it’s a typical case of ‘greenwashing'”, he says, alluding to the misleading propaganda about good environmental practice.

Journalist Maurício Ângelo, creator of the Mining Observatory, also considers that “sustainable mining is a contradiction, due to the very nature of the operation”. “Whether it’s on a large industrial scale, with its gigantic explosions, or illegal mining in the Amazon destroying rivers with dredgers. Just watch videos or visit these places to see that it’s impossible”, he says.

For the president of Febrageo (Brazilian Federation of Geologists), Caiub Kuhn, although all mining activity has an impact on nature, it is possible to mine more sustainably. “We defend mapping, knowing beforehand what is in these areas, we need to know our subsoil, and that depends on investment in research and innovation.”

Kuhn says he sees repositioning in corporate discourse as “a positive effort.”

“But, in practical terms, we haven’t seen any changes. Febrageo defends a policy of development and innovation, improvement in processes to reduce the environmental impact, already foreseen in the environmental law but not regularized. It is very sad that after Brumadinho, Mariana and since the Yanomami tragedy, the sector has not gone through a profound restructuring.”

Like all the other interviewees, Kuhn states that a major obstacle to the attempt to mitigate the effects of the activity on the environment is the scrapping of the ANM (National Mining Agency).

The staff deficit and weaknesses in the structure and budget have led to server outages since May, worrying the entire production chain. Without solving the problems, the goal of “sustainable mining” becomes even more complex.