Peruvian Region Declares Nature Reserve to Block Mining

PIURA, Peru, November 20, 2003 (ENS) - In a move unprecedented in Peru, the Provincial Municipality of Ayabaca has declared its entire territory to be a nature reserve. Ayabacan authorities are seeking to have the highland province declared a nature reserve by the regional government of the Department of Piura and then by the national government.

Advised by the Andean Development Corporation, and supported by the Concerted Roundtable against Poverty, the Andean Tapir Fund, and other provincially based organizations, Ayabaca intends the declaration as a guarantee of its biological and cultural diversity against the threat of mining companies, both foreign and Peruvian.

Ayabaca Municipal Hall (Photo courtesy Municipalidad Provincial de Ayabaca)

At least 120 mining concessions in Ayabaca and more in other parts of northwestern Peru have been authorized to exploit gold bearing deposits. This type of mining requires the construction of gigantic open pits and the utilization of heap leaching processes involving toxic and pervasive chemicals such as cyanide and arsenic.

The Andean Tapir Fund has discovered that nearly all of the remaining occupied habitat of the endangered mountain tapirs in the Cordillera de Las Lagunillas has been selected for gold mining exploitation. If the mining takes place, says the organization's president, ecologist Craig Downer, it would mean "the obliteration of Peru’s last mountain tapirs together with the decimation of hundreds of other ecologically valuable and interrelated, rare species of plants and animals, many still unknown to science."

Protests against mining here are growing day by day. From November 5 through 7, hundreds of campesinos from San Lorenzo Valley, Tambogrande and other communities of northwest Peru conducted a strike to demand that Canada's Manhattan Minerals Corporation and the Peruvian government dump plans for a $405 million gold and copper mine.

Organized by the Front for the Defense of San Lorenzo Valley, the protesters blocked the major highway between Sullana and Tambogrande.

Thousands of people from outlying towns and cities marched on the departmental capital of Piura. In their “pro life” protest, the campesinos blocked major arteries, paralyzing commerce and transportation in Piura.

Demonstrators surrounded the campus of the National University of Piura where an official public review of the Manhattan Minerals Environmental Impact Study (EIS) was planned.

Mango farmer protests the mining proposed for this agricultural region. (Photo courtesy Friends of the Earth International)

The EIS, delivered to the Peruvian government December 2, 2002, was prepared by the Manhattan Minerals Company itself, a fact that the campesinos see as a lack of impartiality and a clear conflict of interest.

The demonstrators prevented the public meeting arranged by Manhattan from taking place. Because of the enormous protest, the National Minister of Energy and Mines Jorge Chamo felt obligated to suspend the meeting, which was all set to grant approval for the open pit mining.

In effect, the strike prevented this staged approval of the project from taking place.

Manhattan, whose option to develop the mine runs out next May, says it will not build the mine without popular consent. The company is "confident that the technology and management structures exist to allow development of mining in Tambogrande in a manner that will have minimal, social and environmental impacts."

Manhattan says that "the very real threat presented by El Niño events and other natural risks are being accounted for in the design, construction and operation of a new mine." A program of monitoring and environmental review are being implemented that will meet the needs identified by concerned people, the company says.

After the strike, another meeting took place in the Arms Plaza of the city of Tambogrande. Present were major national congressmen and representatives of various campesino organizations. All pronounced themselves firmly against mining in San Lorenzo Valley and throughout northwestern Peru.

In a meeting with the Regional Governmental Office of the Department of Piura, the mayor of Tambogrande and representatives of other campesino organizations requested that their home, the San Lorenzo Valley, be declared off limits to all mining, especially development by Manhattan Minerals.

The Piuran Regional Governing Council reaffirmed its solidarity with the people of Tambogrande and the San Lorenzo Valley in the defense of their traditional agrarian way of life and preservation of the region's hydrographic basins and highland watersheds.

The valley is one of Peru’s top fruit growing regions, and the council acknowledged that agriculture here depends upon wilderness for its water supply and that any mining takeover imposed by outsiders would threaten both wilderness and agriculture.

Map of Peru and neighboring countries. The red dot indicates Piura. (Map courtesy CEPICAFE)

The Manhattan Minerals EIS provides that to make room for the open pit mine and a buffer zone between the pit and the remaining portion of the town, up to 1,800 dwellings would be relocated. An entire new neighbourhood and urban center, adjacent to the town, would be built. All residents of the new neighbourhood would have electricity, fresh running water, a sewage system and paved streets. The company points out that only 15 percent of the homes in Tambogrande have these amenities today.

But to the people of the region and to ecologists, the mine and its accompanying amenities, and even the direct wage component estimated at US$100 million over the 12 year operating life of the project, are not worth the loss of their natural resources.

The Ayabacan paramos and cloud forests act as living sponges that absorb, purify, enrich, and equitably distribute abundant waters downslope all year round.

The hundreds of mining operations being planned for northwestern Peru would take over presently intact mountain ecosystems. They would disrupt and contaminate surface and subterranean water flows and prove lethal to many forms of plant and animal life, ecologists say.

Air pollution and the generation of enormous quantities of health-hazardous fine particles would be generated by the mines, critics warn and this pollution would be spread by the characteristic high velocity mountain-to-ocean winds of northwestern Peru.

Ayabacans and ecologists are alarmed that the international mining companies have targeted some of the last habitat of the endangered mountain tapir, Tapirus pinchaque, for their open pit operations.

Among the three nations where the mountain tapir still survives, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, Downer's field studies indicate that between 2,000 to 4,000 mountain tapirs remain alive, making them some of the most imperilled large mammals on Earth.

The survival of mountain tapirs is threatened by development and hunting. (Photo © Craig Downer)

Along with Peru’s Cordillera del Condor further to the east, the Cordillera de Las Lagunillas is the last remaining occupied habitat of the mountain tapir in Peru, Downer says. This species, known in Spanish as the Danta de Montaña, is on Peru's critically endangered list, and is listed as endangered in the IUCN-World Conservation Union's Red Book of Threatened Species.

A recent investigation by biologists Diego Lizcano and Aivi Sissi indicates that only 350 to 375 mountain tapirs may still survive in Peru, based on remaining suitable habitat. However, many of these habitats have been emptied of their tapirs by hunters.

Downer said that tapir conservationists consider it a "very high priority to save the mountain tapirs’ remnant cloud forests and paramos in northern Peru, especially those still occupied by tapirs."

Within the Cordillera de Las Lagunillas, a region estimated at 40,000 hectares (155 square miles) in size, centered around the peak of Cerro Negro, is considered ideal for the long term survival of a viable population of mountain tapirs.

The species lists, GPS aided tapir location maps, and other data sets gathered by the Andean Tapir Fund are now being synthesized into a professional justification for the world's first mountain tapir reserve, dedicated to mountain tapir survival in Peru.

A palo verde near Sullana, Piura (Photo by Dr. Humberto Cardoza Rojas courtesy Universidad Nacional de Piura)

"The life forms found here are key to a better understanding of the evolution of life in the Andes as a whole," Downer says. He believes that during this age of global warming when today’s relatively minor species may soon come to fill the ecological roles of others, these wild areas will act as future refuges for species displaced due to climate change.

These wild areas are inhabited by rare and endemic bird species, such as the white-winged guan, Penelope albipennis, believed to have become extinct by many ornithologists but still occasionally reported by locals.

In August 1988, Downer observed this species to the west of Huancabamba in overgrazed, desertified mountains and together with another Peruvian conservationist prevented its being killed by stone wielding co-travelers.

Pezo says, “The tropical montane ecosystem including the paramo and cloud forest is extremely fragile and susceptible to human caused disturbances. It is a rich and complex mosaic that forms the basis of both our ecological and cultural home and must be conserved."

"The recent protests against the planned mining takeover of our homeland of northwest Peru," said Pezo, "has caused all of our assailed communities to unite and present a common front to defend against the irrational mining invasions and bureaucratic complicities that, if ignorantly allowed, would precipitate an ecological and cultural chaos of enormous proportions and long term consequences.”

The deadline to register objections to the Manhattan Minerals EIS is December 1, after which the company will have 90 days to respond and the government a further 30 days to decide whether or not to approve the mine.