Gold Mining on Papua New Guinea - a destructive business at the cost of local environment and an ancient culture















The report by CorpWatch about gold mining on Papua New Guinea is just devastating. It is in every way the stereotype of how everything goes wrong in extractives business. It grasps in a single article what it means for a pacific island with one of the richest eco-systems in the world, with inhabitants living in ancient culture and without cash economy, to be envaded by a western mining giant that only wants the gold. The result is total destruction of the ecosystem that is home to hundreds of unique species, a total clash of local people with the mining company resulting in deaths and armed forces, destruction of the ancient culture and a jump within one generation from stone-age to cash economy.

I just keep asking myself - how can this happen? The worst thing is perhaps that the gold mining company, Canadian Barrick Gold, tried to approach the project with good stakeholder dialogue and fair compensation to local people and landowners. However, in the end, they dramatically failed to treat the island in a fair way as greed for more gold took over the project.

Can it be that no matter how great CSR programs, stakeholder inclusion and dialogue, and fair compensations plans, an extractives industry where a foreign company is extracting natural resources from somebody else's land is incrementally doomed to failure? Why is it that even if environmental damage and lost of land area is accounted for in modern extractives projects, nobody still takes into account the cultural loss and the inevitable conflict that arises from the confrontation of a Western company with ancient cultures living without cash in traditional ways?

Check out the full report on http://corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14381