From: lessgovt@gmail.com   
      
   Gold’s Deadly Truth: Much Is Mined With Mercury   
   By Fabian Federl and Jack Nicas, Sept. 22, 2023, NY Times   
   Suriname has banned mercury, yet the substance is easily smuggled in and   
   widely used.   
   The Surinamese government did not respond to multiple requests for comment.   
   While Western countries, including the United States, have largely phased out   
   mercury, more than 10 million people in 70 countries — mostly poorer nations   
   across Asia, Africa and Latin America — still use the toxic element to   
   extract gold from the    
   ground, according to the United Nations.   
      
   These small-scale miners produce a fifth of the world’s gold — and nearly   
   two-fifths of the world’s mercury pollution, according to the United Nations   
   and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Mining is the leading source of   
   mercury emissions,    
   ahead of coal-fired power plants.   
      
   “This is the brutal face of poverty,” said Achim Steiner, chief of the   
   U.N. Development Program. For many miners, “the fact that mercury might harm   
   me in 10 years’ time is too far from the reality of survival,” he added.   
      
   Large-scale gold miners use centrifuge machines or cyanide, which does not   
   seep into the environment. Small miners choose mercury because it is cheap,   
   easy to use and still available.   
      
   “Mercury, for better or worse, is a very simple technology, used for the   
   better part of 2,000 years,” said Luis Fernandez, a Wake Forest University   
   professor who has studied small-scale gold mining. “You can learn how to be   
   a miner in 15 minutes,    
   and you get pretty good results.”   
      
   While many countries have banned mercury in mining, enforcement is lax, Mr.   
   Fernandez said. Gold mining “is an economic pressure valve for poorer   
   countries,” he said. And that has only been compounded by the 12 percent   
   rise in gold prices over the    
   past year, to nearly $2,000 an ounce.   
      
   In 2013, the international community signed a broad treaty to take mercury off   
   the market. It was called the Minamata Convention, named for a Japanese city   
   where decades of industrial mercury pollution caused neurological diseases in   
   more than 2,200    
   residents and even poisoned the city’s cats, causing them to jump into the   
   sea.   
      
   Under the convention — which 145 nations, including Suriname, have now   
   ratified — countries pledged to ban new mercury mines, close existing ones   
   and, with some exceptions, halt the import and export of mercury.   
      
   The United States and European Union have since banned virtually all mercury   
   exports, leaving the United Arab Emirates, Tajikistan, Russia, Mexico and   
   Nigeria as some of the largest exporters. Researchers believe that China,   
   which adopted the treaty,    
   remains the world’s largest user of mercury.   
      
   The Minamata Convention, however, did not target small-scale gold mining.   
   “Evidence has shown time and again that if you ban something that people   
   need and there is no alternative, you simply drive them into illegality,”   
   Mr. Steiner said.   
      
   Where Mr. Aguiar lives along the Maroni River, which forms the boundary   
   between Suriname and French Guiana, everyone is either a miner or works for   
   one. About 15 percent of Suriname’s work force, or 18,000 people, is   
   connected to the gold mining    
   industry, one of the highest percentages in the world, according to studies by   
   the Free University of Amsterdam.   
      
   At the mines, workers shoot pressurized water to wash away generations of   
   sediment, cutting into the landscape and exposing the layer they hope contains   
   gold. Then they throw mercury into the water so it will bind naturally with   
   any gold below.   
      
   The mercury is not hard to come by — and experts believe that much of it   
   arrives from China.   
      
   A few hours before Mr. Aguiar was tossing mercury into his mine, where he   
   employs seven people, he docked his canoe at one of the dozens of Chinese   
   merchants on the banks of the Maroni. The shops sell the same goods:   
   Coca-Cola, instant noodles, condoms    
   and mercury. Mr. Aguiar bought a kilogram in an unmarked prescription drug   
   bottle for $250. If he is lucky, it will be enough to mine a half-kilogram of   
   gold, which he can sell for roughly $25,000.   
      
   Elsewhere in Suriname, vendors posted listings on Facebook and cabdrivers   
   offered mercury connections. People across the country said mercury sellers   
   were overwhelmingly Chinese, and interactions with several Chinese sellers   
   revealed that they had little    
   concern that they were doing anything illegal; mercury was a product like any   
   other.   
      
   The Organization of American States said this year that mercury in Suriname   
   was probably “imported from China on container ships bringing in other   
   goods, such as mining equipment.”   
      
   In South America, researchers believe, only Bolivia imports mercury legally.   
      
   “So the question is: Where does it come from?” President Chandrikapersad   
   Santokhi of Suriname told reporters in May. “We know it’s smuggled.”   
      
   Dr. Wilco Zijlmans, a pediatrician in Suriname who has studied the health   
   effects of mercury, said its impact was clear. In a 2020 study of 1,200   
   Surinamese women that he helped conduct, 97 percent had unsafe levels of   
   mercury in their bodies.   
      
   In addition to the elevated rate of birth complications, Dr. Zijlmans also   
   found that children in Suriname were far more likely today than a generation   
   ago to have delayed brain development, decreased motor skills and worse   
   language and social abilities.   
      
   The effects are also showing up across the border. The Wayana Indigenous   
   community has about 1,000 members spread across Suriname and French Guiana,   
   which is French territory. Those in French Guiana have French citizenship, and   
   French doctors have    
   tracked the spread of mercury in some of their villages, which are surrounded   
   by more than two dozen gold mines.   
      
   “Eventually, this will become like Minamata, too,” said Ms. Opoya, the   
   Wayana member, who lives in one of the villages on French territory.   
      
   Upriver, when Mr. Aguiar wants to cash in, he takes his haul to the Chinese   
   merchants who sell him the mercury. Those merchants then head to the hundreds   
   of small gold-buying shops dotted across Paramaribo, Suriname’s capital.   
      
   At one shop, the owner, Arnaldo Ribeiro, said he buys just about all the gold   
   that comes through his doors but has little idea where it comes from or   
   whether it has been mined with mercury.   
      
      
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    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)