A delicate balancing act
Precautionary principle advanced to help resolve Cockpit Country dispute
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT professional Eleanor Jones has recommended the application of the ‘precautionary principle’ to help settle the latest round of disagreements over the protection of Jamaica’s ecologically spectacular Cockpit Country.
“We have all of this argument and counterargument, but they are really missing the real point,” she said, referencing a recent protest staged by Noranda Bauxite outside the offices of the Jamaica Environment Trust.
Noranda stakeholders last month journeyed from St Ann to Kingston to register their objection to their depiction in the media as being out to destroy the Cockpit Country – home to diverse endemic plant and animal species and the source of freshwater for some 40 per cent of Jamaicans.
They were also there to reiterate that, in fact, the area of special mining licence 173, which is the area currently being disputed, is outside of the Cockpit Country Protected Area (CCPA) that was announced by the Government in November 2017.
“The point is not that that section is not included in the CCPA, it is that Dornoch Head is included in the area of the licence, and Dornoch Head is where the Rio Bueno rises and the Rio Bueno is a major river. The Rio Bueno rises at Dornoch Head and Eleanor Jones, sustainable development professional. we don’t know enough about the groundwater circulation,”she added.
“We know that underneath, we have things that are interconnected and you don’t want to disrupt something you cannot fix. It comes back to the precautionary principle which is, where you have areas at risk and you don’t have sufficient scientific information, you don’t do anything until you know enough about it,” Jones said further.
Noranda, meanwhile, maintains that they are open to discussion with stakeholders on the matter.
“We know how discussion can solve problems. We would like to discuss the issue so that we can clarify our position to those who may not understand,” Lance Neita, consultant for community and public relations with the company, told The Gleaner some weeks ago.
“Noranda welcomed, like everybody else, the declaration in 2017 that made the Cockpit Country an untouchable reserve; and Noranda, our 800 Jamaican employees, and the people who benefit in terms of indirect work and so on, share the respect for the Cockpit Country heritage,”he added.
At the same time, the entity has insisted on the value of bauxite mining to communities.
“Bauxite and alumina earnings continue to be a mainstay of the economy. Noranda, the sole bauxite exporter, pumps about US$80 million into the economy annually and provides jobs. We have been mining for 50 years and if we are not allowed to mine, you have to think in terms of your sustainability, the sustainability of your company,” he said.
“If, God forbid, … Noranda were to be shuttered, think about the hole that would create. We have to look at the balance. You have to do some hard thinking about how those earnings would be replaced,” Neita added.
For herself, while acknowledging the need for a trade-off between development and conservation, Jones said that it is well known and accepted that mining is not good for the environment. As such, certainly for the Cockpit Country, she said efforts would be better spent investing in alternative livelihoods.
“I am not anti-development because clearly you have to have it. But we need to look at alternative livelihoods. Ecosystem is a big deal now. Costa Rica, for example, is making a tonne of money out of its natural resources. What are we doing? We are destroying the forests, building in the beach zone, destroying coastal assets. We are not managing our assets in a sustainable way,” she said.
Local communication stakeholders and others who have long lobbied for protection for the Cockpit Country, including Hugh Dixon of the Southern Trelawny Environmental Agency, argue that the CCPA should be revisited.
“We want them to withdraw the licence, revisit the boundary of Cockpit Country and make it be the full landscape represented by the Cockpit Country Stakeholders Group (CCSG) that is protected,” he told The Gleaner.
The CCSG boundary takes in St Ann, St Elizabeth, St James, and Trelawny, and is estimated to deny access to some 300 million tons of bauxite, or US$9 billion in earnings.