Sunday Tribune May 13, 2007 Edition 2
As an Australian mining company plans to plunder the dunes of the Wild Coast, Leon Marshall ponders whether the lure of jobs and wealth creation will overcome pressing environmental concerns

by Leon Marshall

Shades of St Lucia are hanging heavily over the Wild Coast, where dune mining is causing divisions in the community. Even the arguments are the same, as are the rising tensions that have led to allegations of threats and acts of violence.

Dr Ian Player, doyen of South African conservationists, said, “I have been a miner in my life, and so have my father and my grandfather and my great-grandfather, and I know the value of mining. But to mine coastal dunes is a desecration of our country.”

Accusations of bribery of local leaders, and of intimidation having been flying about. The murder, as far back as 2003, of a headman, Madoda Ndovela, has been ascribed to his opposition to mining.

Fears are that tensions could rise in coming months as the deadline approaches for a final decision on whether or not to proceed with mining in this beautiful part of South Africa.

The climate is not unlike that over the St Lucia mining issue, on the KwaZulu-Natal North Coast, where Richard’s Bay Minerals was, until the mid 1990s, set on mining the dunes on the Zululand coast for titanium and other minerals and where the situation was exacerbated by community disagreement.

The proposed dune-mining site on the Wild Coast, about half-way between East London and Durban, is once again a precious natural landscape that is under siege.

This time it is an Australian company, Mineral Resource Commodities (MRC), which wants to mine the dunes for their billions’s worth of titanium.

Heritage site

As with St Lucia, a key justification given for wanting to override the environmental concerns is the opportunity to create jobs in a region beset by poverty. Another is that much of the area to be mined has already suffered ecological degradation and could in fact benefit from rehabilitation after mining.

Again it is a case of environmentalists pitted against a powerful mining concern. In the case of St Lucia, the environmentalists’ protracted obstruction ultimately paid off when the new ANC government of president Nelson Mandela put a stop to the mining plans.

The question is, do they have any chance of again prevailing as they did once before, to the benefit of a natural area which has since been declared a World Heritage Site?

From an environmental perspective, the situation does not look rosy. MRC and its South African subsidiary, Transworld Energy and Mineral Resources (TEM), have struck up a partnership with the local Xolobeni community empowerment company XolCo and have just lodged their mining application with the Department of Minerals and Energy (DME) in Port Elizabeth.

MRC chief executive Alan Luscombe has been quoted as describing the acceptance of the application as an important step which clears the way for the company to proceed with the necessary studies required to apply for mining approval by way of mining right.

A spokesman of the department has said that the required process of public participation would come into motion tomorrow (Monday) when consultative and information meetings would start in the proposed mining area between company officials and members of the local communities.
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A further part of the required procedure is to prepare a scoping report and an environmental impact assessment, which has to be submitted by mid-October.

The Australian mining company’s partnership with a local-community group has added a persuasive black economic empowerment aspect to what is called the Xolobeni Mineral Sands Project. Another factor weighing in mining’s favour is the tendency of the department, based on its recent track record, to be more accommodating to business and much less sympathetic to the environment than the ANC administration of a decade ago.

The mining camp is basing its case heavily on the economic advantages to a region of which it paints a dismal picture - 71% unemployment, malnutrition, illiteracy, far-off clinics, long walks to school for children, no electricity and no clean water.

Echoing the pro-mining sentiments once advanced in the case of St Lucia, it talks about economic upliftment of local communities and of creating basic infrastructure which is currently lacking. And, in an unlikely touch of good fellowship for a foreign company, it also talks about helping to promote South Africa’s position as one of the world’s top three mineral-sands producers.

The environmental conundrum is compounded by proposals for a highway that would cut through the area, ending its seclusion, which environmentalists say is a key factor in its ecological and ecotourism value.

Exploitation

Minister of Environmental Affairs Marthinus van Schalkwyk has turned down the road application on procedural grounds, but the National Road Agency has now reapplied, this time presumably following the correct procedure. Again, the argument in favour of the road is that it will bring development to the area.

Conservationists reject this, saying the road will bypass bigger communities already served by good roads, and it will pass through a sparsely populated area which will receive no gain, and instead see their ecotourism prospects harmed.

Much as their St Lucia peers once did, they are promoting their case for preserving the area’s spectacularly beautiful landscape with arguments about the more widespread and lasting benefits its exploitation as an ecotourism destination would bring.

John Clarke, a leading anti-mining campaigner in the area, has even submitted a complaint to the Human Rights Commission on behalf of the local communities on the basis that at least two of their rights are being violated - their right to information relevant to the exercise or protection of their rights, and the right to have the environment protected for the benefit of present and future generations.

This indicates that the public information and consultation process which the mining camp needs to go through could become a source of serious contention.

An article Clarke has co-written with Richard Spoor says the threatened area is of inestimable cultural and environmental value. Hosting the Pondoland Centre for Endimism, a global biodiversity hotspot, it is arguably the most beautiful coastline on Earth.

Taking issue with the Australian company, the article adds, “Mining the Pondoland Wild Coast is the moral, cultural and aesthetic equivalent of quarrying Ayers Rock for granite, or the Great Barrier Reef for calcium carbonate.”

Posted on May 13th, 2007
Filed under: Newspaper and Media