Global mining boom puts livelihoods of poorest farmers in danger
As global mining booms amid ever-increasing demand for rare earth minerals and land, more poor farmers are having livelihoods threatened
Doima, a small farming town, lies in the heart of central Colombia's agricultural belt. Fed by sediment-rich water running down from the Andes, this is the region where farmers grow rice, maize, plantain and beans for the whole country. A hundred kilometres away, however, a proposed gold mine threatens to change this fertile landscape forever.
The mine, operated by AngloGold Ashanti (AGA), would sit in a steep mountainous area, but the proposed area for processing the mined rocks and building the tailings dam needed for storing the toxic wastewater would be the flat farmland around Doima.
"There would be a lot of material removed and they can't process it there - they need a flatter area," says Mariana Gomez Soto, an activist from Doima who, along with the rest of the community, is fighting against the mine.
"It would be very easy for AGA to build a dam in the mountain valley," says Soto. "They would have to build a huge road to directly connect the mine to this area, cutting through the land. The purpose of this land would change. It wouldn't be a farming region any more."
According to a recent report by the Gaia Foundation, this is just one example of how extractive industries around the world are increasingly threatening farmland and the livelihoods of food producers.
Mining is itself nothing new, but the scale and nature of it is changing, says Liz Hosken, director of the Gaia Foundation.