GHRA proposes strategies to combat impacts of mining

The Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA) has made several recommendations to be adopted by indigenous communities seeking to combat the negative effects of mining on their way of life.
A recent GHRA publication entitled, “The Impact of Mining: Survival Strategies for Interior Communities in Guyana”, suggests that unless steps are consciously taken to resist them, the communal dimension of indigenous life will continue to be sacrificed at an accelerating rate due to the negative effects of mining.
The proposed strategies are aimed at reinforcing the communal dimension of life, which will both build capacity for a more autonomous direction of communities and combat the ill-effects of mining.
According to the Association, the threat is significantly greater now than when it first engaged with this problem over 30 years ago.
“Indigenous communities are pressured to a much greater degree to be more ambitious, to improve their material lifestyle and to provide their families with educational opportunities, all of which require access to a cash income which only mining can currently provide,” the GHRA noted.
But the organisation’s study proposes alternative strategies rooted in the life of the community, rather than the “national development experience”. The GHRA said this process was premised on encouraging the community to take responsibility for its own future, rather than being dependent on externally-devised and led interventions – like mining.
“The conventional approach to development promotes an overly individualistic understanding of human rights at the expense of the communal dimension of life in indigenous communities,” the body stated.
The GHRA observed that Guyanese indigenous communities, compared to their Latin American counterparts, have been discouraged from their spiritual and cultural beliefs in which a sense of living in harmony with each other and with nature is central.  Therefore, the central focus of the organisation’s proposed strategies is to strengthen the community as distinct from strengthening individuals within the community.
“Strengthening individual capacities, whether economic, academic, sporting or cultural, must be undertaken in a manner that reinforces rather than weakens the community,” the GHRA said.
The first recommendation is the development of community life plans.
“Indigenous communities should be encouraged to develop a comprehensive life plan for the intermediate future. Current economic planning does not go beyond the requirements of funders to access development,” the GHRA documented.

A recent GHRA publication entitled “The Impact of Mining: Survival Strategies for Interior Communities in Guyana”
A recent GHRA publication entitled “The Impact of Mining: Survival Strategies for Interior Communities in Guyana”

The body noted that these indigenous communities needed a clear vision of where they wanted their communities to be over the next decade, with respect to land territorial boundaries, productive activity, infrastructure, education, language and health.
“Development of such plans involving the whole community is a mechanism both to strengthen the community’s sense of itself, as well as provide purpose and context for evaluating specific plans and proposals brought to the communities,” the body noted.  The other strategy is to create support networks, both actual and virtual, aimed at overcoming the isolation and fragmentation of community life induced by mining.
The GHRA outlined that these networks should focus on facilitating contacts between persons outside communities, responding to emergencies, maintaining contact with children in educational institutions on the coast and assisting Amerindians in trouble with the law.
Another strategy is to support actions for women in these communities to address the absence of males from family life; neglect of farming by males which ultimately throws the burden of subsistence onto the wife and children; the increased presence of non-Amerindian miners, traders and other itinerant males and trafficking of young women to mining areas among others.
The study also provides an interactive use of social media, television and radio as a tool for reducing isolation within families and communities.
The full report is available from the GHRA offices at $800 a copy.