State-owned diamond company Alexkor as recently as four years ago wanted to mine the Ramsar wetlands site at the mouth of the Orange River, it emerged on Thursday.
However, it was warned off by its environmental consultant, who said the move would provoke an international outcry.
The revelation is contained in a confidential memorandum produced at the Richtersveld land-claim hearing in Cape Town, now in its second week.
The memo, dated October 8 2001, is from outside environmental consultant Dries Visser to John Oosthuizen, the company’s engineering manager, apparently with responsibility for environmental management as well.
In it, Visser notes that Alexkor had done ”relatively little” to implement an environmental management programme report (EMPR) drawn up for it in 1994 at a cost of R3-million, and urged a ”new approach” to rehabilitation of areas disturbed by mining.
”You have also mentioned [the] probability of mining in the estuary of the Orange River — the Ramsar site,” he says. ”If you should undertake the work there you will, naturally, have to undertake an EIA [environmental impact assessment].
”This study will have to be reviewed by all the authorities, especially the provincial nature conservation department, and, in view of the international status of the site, they will in turn refer the study to the national departments of environmental affairs and tourism and of foreign affairs.
”Thus you can expect a vehement negative reaction, simply because international politics will inevitably come into the picture.
”Personnel inside these departments will no doubt refer the EIA to non-government organisations, which will play the game as dirty as possible.
”Any probability of embarrassment to any of the politicians will lead to your management team being put in the worst possible light — you will be blamed for everything …
”Thus I think you should seriously ask yourself the question: Is it really worth it?”
The 1971 Ramsar convention aims to halt the worldwide loss of wetlands and to conserve those that remain.
The Orange River mouth, declared a Ramsar site in 1991, comprises wetland habitats, including salt marsh, islands, braided channels and open water.
According to the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) avian demography unit, the site has in the past supported up to 20 000 waterbirds, though this figure now rarely exceeds 10 000.
The site is included in the Richtersveld community’s claim to more than 84 000ha of land seized by the state in the 1920s when diamonds were discovered there.
The community is also claiming R1,067-billion for repair of the environmental damage done by Alexkor’s mining activities, which involve removing large amounts of overburden with earth-moving equipment to reach diamonds as deep as 30m below the surface.
‘Considerable damage’ caused
Ecologist Tony Barbour, of UCT’s environmental evaluation unit, appearing as an expert witness for the community, told the hearing on Thursday that Alexkor’s activities have already caused considerable damage to the Ramsar site.
One of the sources of this damage is the nearby Noordsif slimes dam. A plume of fine sediment from the dam has blown on to the Ramsar site and affected the salt marshes.
Though Alexkor tried to deal with this by ”armouring” the dam with a layer of coarse material, the damage to the wetlands has reached a state that resulted in the site being placed on the so-called Montreaux record.
”The significance of this is that the continued status and protection that the Gariep [Orange River] site has under Ramsar are now under threat,” he said.
Asked for his comment on the Alexkor proposal to mine the site, he said: ”I don’t think it could be supported.”
He also said that on a visit to Alexkor, his team of environmental experts had found little or no evidence that the company was trying to rehabilitate land scarred by three-quarters of a century of mining, even mining done after the completion of the 1994 EMPR.
”Based on our observations on the site, we came to the conclusion that there’s been no compliance with the major requirements of the EMPR by Alexkor,” Barbour said.
Visser says in the October 2001 memorandum that the ”basic reason” for Alexkor not implementing most of the important EMPR requirements appears to be ”the prohibitive price tag”.
Instead, he says, Alexkor has been trying to get the EMPR itself changed.
”Continual postponement of practical actions have led to acrimonious confrontations between Alexkor management and the Department of Minerals and Energy,” he says.
Intriguingly, Visser also warns Oosthuizen that trade union members are ”very much aware of their rights in terms of the 1998 National Environmental Management Act”.
The reason for this awareness, he says, is that his company, Bohlweki Environmental, was contracted to the National Union of Mineworkers to train its national organisers in environmental legal rights and obligations.
”I am concerned that disgruntled employees (especially those retrenched for some or other reason) may use their environmental rights as a weapon to create havoc in the day-to-day management of the company,” he says. — Sapa