Farmers in some mining communities in Ghana are being denied the right to cultivate their farmlands as a result of the activities of mining companies.
One such community is Teberibe in the Western Region whose case is currently
being handled by a High Court in Tarkwa. The people of Teberibe did not only lose their farmlands and cocoa trees when Anglo-gold Ashanti Limited decided to expand its waste rock but their homes and properties as well since the community itself was grazed down to form part of the site for dumping their waste rock
One victim was Mr. James Sarpong, a farmer whose house was mowed down together with all his property in his absence. Mr. Sarpong, now without any property or farm has sought refuge at the Tarkwa office of WACAM where he is receiving support.
In an interview with the Advocate in Tamale, Daniel Owusu Koranteng, Executive Director of WACAM, an advocacy NGO which provides support to communities affected by mining said the act constituted a human rights abuse. It is in this regard that WACAM, which engages in policy advocacy related to mining and also provides legal support to victims of human rights abuses is assisting the victim to seek legal redress.
Narrating the background to the incident, Mr Koranteng said the Teberibe Community, including Mr Sarpong decided to take legal action against Anglo-Gold Ashanti Limited when the company starting dumping its waste rock on their farms without paying compensation on the basis of the Mineral and Mining Act. The case was adjourned by a Tarkwa High Court but Anglo-Gold Ashanti went to another High Court at Takoradi where they sought an eviction order against the community because they needed to expand the site for their waste rock. Immediately it was granted, the company went ahead and demolished the community buildings in the absence of Mr sarpong who could not retrieve any property.
Another member of the community, Anthony Badu, was shot when he attempted to navigate his way to his farm amidst waste rock dumped by the company which blocked the route to their farms.
Mr Koranteng said the route to the community farms had been prolonged by as much as nine kilometers following the dumping of waste rock on the paths leading to the farms so some farmers resorted to a detour around the rock waste to shorten their journey.
The company perceived this action on the part of farmers as dangerous since they could be trapped by trucks dumping waste rock. Hence, it brought in soldiers to deter the farmers from using the short cuts. Mr. Badu was shot one morning while on his way to the farm following some skirmishes between his community and the soldiers.
According to him, Mr Badu was left unattended in a pool of blood for almost an hour before the company took him to the 37 military hospital following the intervention of WACAM where he was on admission for nine months.
Mr Badu, now a cripple has lost his source of livelihood as a farmer since he can no longer farm. “We are working on his case and we want to make sure that we have adequate compensation for him”, Mr Kornteng said.
Another case, involving a young man whose arm was blown off by dynamite left in his community by a mining company has been put before the Commission for Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ). This followed the failure of the company to fulfill its promises of assistance to the victim following the accident.
Mr Koranteng said “The unfortunate thing is that mining is competing for the same land as cocoa. At Kenyase which is a major cocoa growing area, Newmont is mining in the area and intends to mine so many places. They are pulling down cocoa trees and paying very little money to the farmers. Hence Kenyase which used to export food is experiencing price hikes in food.”
He described the situation as unfortunate since the contribution of agriculture to the economy supersedes that of gold. While mining deals with a non-renewable resource, agriculture deals with a renewable resource. If you plant a cocoa tree and it gets too old, you can cut and replant. Gold mining on the other hand is an enclave activity that stands on its own. There is no value addition.
“In Ghana, most of our educated people were educated through the Cocoa Marketing Board scholarship. Thus, the farmer can use his cocoa farm to educate his children. How many people have been educated by gold? People built mighty houses out of the proceeds of cocoa which also constitutes a heirloom with most children inheriting their parents cocoa farms”, Mr Koranteng said.
He attributed this to the fact that money derived from cocoa is retained in the country while that of gold is taken out of the country which constitutes a capital flight. Besides, cocoa does not degrade the environment while mining does.
Mr. Koranteng said cocoa farms employ a lot of people but how many people can be employed by a mining company, especially, since people living in mining communities normally do not possess the kind of expertise required by mining companies.
He said according to Professor Kasim Kassingar, a prominent Ghanaian valuer, a cocoa tree can yield half a bag of cocoa a year with the current price for a bag of cocoa being 150 Ghana cedis.
“Even if you assume that each tree produces a quarter bag of cocoa beans over the tree’s economic life of fifty years out of its lifespan of about 100 years and a tree gives a farmer 20 Ghana cedis a year, if you multiply that by fifty, you get a 1000 Ghana cedis. However, the mining companies pay less than10 Ghana cedis for each cocoa tree they cut down which is grossly inadequate”, Mr Koranteng said.
A research carried out by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) has said that Ghana benefits very little from the mining and exportation of gold which accounts for only five percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
This situation has been attributed to Ghana’s Mining and Mineral Act 2006 which governs the activities of mining companies.
In an interview with the Advocate on the issue, Mr Daniel Owusu Koranteng, Executive Director of WACAM said, “The physical regime gives a lot of incentives and exemptions to the mining companies and thus provides the mining companies the opportunity to take the lion’s share. If you pit the five percent against the social and environmental cost, we are not getting anything.”
Mr Koranteng said the problem dates back to the early 1980’s when Ghana decided to heed to the dictates of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), under the Economic Recovery Programme (ERP). One of the requirements was for Ghana to open up its mining sector to foreign investors.
“The World Bank influenced our law. Hence, the law that was drafted during the period, which was PNDC law 153, served the corporate interest of mining companies to the detriment of Ghana”, Mr. Koranteng said.
Following the interventions of Advocacy organizations, the law was reviewed to the Minerals and Mining Act which is still operational today. However, not much could be achieved under the Mineral and Mining Act which was enacted in 2006.
“While Advocacy Organizations were struggling for a law that would be fair to Ghanaians and mining communities especially, the mining companies also struggled for a law that would ensure that they continue to get the lion’s share and they got away with it”, Mr Koranteng said.
“The Minerals and Mining Act, 2006, still inherited the colonial legacies of PNDC law 153. There were only a few gains like the compensation principle; it is still a neo- colonial law that does not provide adequate protection for the sovereignty and rights of mining communities and the country. The laws are very week and we need to do something about it”, he said.
Mr Koranteng said under the Minerals and Mining Act which gives a lot of generous incentives to mining companies, they do not pay import duty on machinery, while some of them do not even pay any Value Added Tax (VAT). Some of the companies have also negotiated for the retention of 80 percent of mineral revenues in offshore accounts.
“The Act stipulates that mining companies should pay royalties of only three to six percent with all the mining companies paying three percent hence we are not getting enough for development. Ghana’s investment agreement with Newmont exempts the company from paying VAT and allows it to pay a royalty of only three percent”, he said.
“The laws that we have are neo-colonial laws that ensure that the resources that we have are taken away. It is no different from when the white man was here and taking our resources away. This time we have made laws to ensure that they take everything away leaving us only five percent of the proceeds and 100 percent of the problems, including environmental degradation, pollution of rives and water sources through cyanide spillage, acid drainage and the pollution of ground water. There are also issues like air and dust pollution, and cracking of buildings through the intensity of blasting, waste rock dumps and abandoned pits and trenches”, he lamented.
Mr Koranteng cited the case of the Prestea Goldmines which alone has 45 abandoned pits. “People in mining communities fall into these pits and get killed. A pit that is 500 metres deep, a kilometer wide and 2.5 kilometees long is a small pit. Some pits are seven kilometres long and when you stand at the edge of such pits, you feel dizzy.”
He said these are pits that can never be reclaimed and would continue to trap a lot of animals and affect wildlife and bird diversity. They also get filled with water and become breeding grounds for mosquitoes.
“If you hear that a mining company has a mosquito control programme, you would think that they are helping to prevent malaria, but no, they are merely attempting to control the number of mosquitoes generated from their own pits. They have made the mosquito control programme their flagship project, purported to control malaria but mining companies have so many pits that are a breeding ground for mosquitoes”, Mr Koranteng said.
Ghana has given out a mining lease for mining activities to start in the Agyanuabopo Forest Reserve in the Birim North area, despite a query from the United Nations and petitions from over 6000 people from 50 countries all over the world.
The forest reserve which is home to rare and endangered species of animals is purported to contain 8.2 million ounces of gold.
Announcing this to the Advocate in Tamale, Mr Daniel Owusu Koranteng, Executive Director of Wacam, said “Many of our forest reserves are sitting on minerals and the mining companies have targeted them for exploitation. Meanwhile, when they mine it, they will take the gold away and dump their waste rock on the farms of communities. We have given them the off reserves to mine and now we are giving them the forest reserves”.
Mr Koranteng cautioned government to take a second look at the issue, saying, we need to be careful as a nation. We need to put a moratorium on the granting of more mining concessions and do a cost/ benefit analysis and also review the positive and negative impacts of previous concessions that we have given out. We must stop this issue of giving out all the time without counting the costs and consequences.
He also decried the decision of Newmont Limited to mine the royal cemetery of the Akyem Kotoku Traditional area, saying, “it does not make sense to mine royal cemeteries. Leave chiefs to sleep in peace.”
He said “It has been written in the Environmental Impact Study of Newmont, that they are going to exhume the bodies of chiefs of the Akyem Kotoku Traditional Area, perform rituals and send the bodies to another cemetery. This is unthinkable. Would somebody ever think of going to mine Buckingham Palace if that is what would bail the UK out of their economic problems?
Mr. Koranteng, who referred to issues such as mining cemeteries and the destruction of shrines which bear a lot of spiritual significance to their communities as intangibles, said they are the most serious of all issues since one cannot put a monetary value on them yet their impact is great and are always ignored by mining companies.
“The things that touch on the very existence and the mind and the soul of people, Things that make people feel that they are human beings and have an identity as human beings; these are the things that mining companies destroy and there is no value put on it.”
He said considering the fact Ghana has minerals from the south to the north and with the exception of some few areas along the Volta Basin, the rest of Ghana is covered with gold, its adhoc exploitation without recourse to its consequences would spell peril for the nation.
Added to this is the use of violence by mining companies to intimidate mining communities. “One day we cannot contain the social explosion. The mining companies are teaching the communities violence. The more they use violence against the people, the more they are teaching them violence as a tool and one day they would use it against them.”
“The issue is we have given out every good thing to get very little from mining and we have been trapped in a situation where we think that if we do not allow them to destroy more things, and we cut off from the little money that they are giving us, the country would run into more problems”, Mr Koranteng said.
He said this outlook is coupled with the fact that the mining companies are prepared to pay their way to have their way; “Hence, you cannot rule out the use of bribery as a result of which the country’s leaders are torn between protecting the sovereign rights of Ghanaians and protecting the corporate interest of mining companies. We have our leaders hanging between the companies and our people. Otherwise, why are they allowing them to do all the things they are doing to this country when the facts show that we get very little.”
He called for action in this regard, saying, “there is the need for advocacy in this direction to ensure that we pull our leaders from this trapping of protecting the corporate interest of mining companies otherwise the interest of Ghanaians and mining communities would continue to be trampled upon.”
Mr Koranteng said “our cultural integrity as a people and our political and economic freedom is under threat. What makes us a sovereign nation is when we have full control over decisions and the benefits from our national resources. If you live in a country where somebody comes to take 95 percent of your resources away, and leaves you with 100 percent of the problems, how independent are you? The neo-colonialism that Nkrumah talked about, this is it.”
A large percentage of Ghana’s wildlife are losing their homes as their habitats are taken over by agricultural, economic social and other human activities with the result that their population is fast dwindling.
A major contributory factor is the notion among farmers that wildlife constitutes a pest which compete directly with their agricultural activities. They therefore do not care if wildlife is destroyed by other people and may even be accomplices.
This was disclosed by Mr. Moses K. Komoah, Regional Manager of the Wildlife Division of the Forestry Commission at a Training Workshop and Stakeholders Meeting on Natural Resource Advocacy for Civil Society Organizations in Tamale. It was attended by forty participants from the Upper East, Upper West and the Northern Region.
“Wildlife is a source of food and income to rural communities While local conservation mechanisms that protect wildlife such as taboo or totem animals exist, an animal that is not eaten in one community may be eaten in the next community thus undermining their conservation”, Mr Komoah said.
Ghana’s present Legislative Instrument on Wildlife did not take into cognizance the enormous value of wildlife outside the protected areas while inadequate funding to the Wildlife Division of the Forestry Commission restricts its activities since a significant proportion of its funds is spent on enforcing laws in the protected areas alone.
The Wildlife Division has therefore evolved a new mechanism for the management of wildlife involving communities on the fringes of protected zones.
“The Wildlife Division’s “traditional” form of wildlife management which excludes local communities fringing protected areas from any form of decision making process with respect to wildlife management does not help wildlife conservation since the communities see wildlife as belonging to government who is depriving them of a resource which they consider as theirs”, Mr Komoah said.
The new mechanism, dubbed Community Resource Management Areas (CREMAs), works as a community based organization with an executive structure and a constitution that guides and regulates wildlife activities in that community with the sole aim of promoting the sustainability of wildlife.
This mechanism creates an incentive for farmers by allowing them to benefit from the use of natural resources which in turn encourages them to manage and use these resources sustainably. Communities and land owners are given the right to access and control their natural resources.
This creates a win-win situation where natural resources are given value and communities to manage their resources sustainably thus ensuring their conservation.
Benefits of CREMA include improved livelihoods and human well being, ensures that habitats are secured and endangered species are protected and also strengthens accountability and democratization at the community level. It also promotes the diversification of income generation which strengthens local economies.
Communities where CREMA is operational include Murugu – Mognori , adjacent to Mole National Park, Jillinkon , which is also adjacent to Mole National Park and Zukpiri in the Nadowli District which is along the Black Volta river.
Areas where CREMA is being proposed include Communities on the fringes of the Nazinga Game Reserve in Burkina Faso and the Mole National Park and communities along the Kabore Tampi National Park in Burkina Faso and Gambaga Scarp Forest Reserve.
“CREMA is a land use option which when properly managed will reverse land degradation and bring wealth to rural communities. If the CREMA concept is not implemented the current trend of adverse modification of wildlife habitat will continue and wildlife outside the Protected Areas will gradually disappear. This will lead to increased poaching of wildlife in the Protected Areas and within a short time wildlife in Protected Areas will also disappear and Ghana will lose this important national heritage”, Mr Komoah said.
