Mining dispute suggests ‘green’ fears are valid

FEARS the Department of Mineral Resources would not properly police the environmental laws governing mines appear to have been borne out by a case before the High Court in Cape Town.

John Clarke, an environmental specialist who attended this week’s court case, said the evidence confirmed that the department seemed to be a “law unto themselves”.

Since December, the National Environmental Management Act has applied to the mining industry — and mineral resources, rather than the Department of Environmental Affairs, has been responsible for enforcing it.

In the case before court evidence has emerged that Mineral Sand Resources has come under fire for damage it caused by mining zircon and rutile from pristine West Coast beaches near Vredendal, 350km north of Cape Town.

There have been complaints that the mining operations encroached on land for which the company did not have approval and that it built a jetty without authorisation.

A two-page letter from the Department of Mineral Resources’ Western Cape regional manager, Duduzile Kunene, to the company’s general manager, has sparked controversy.

Kunene’s letter, written on May 21, breezily dismisses the complaints and states that Mineral Sand Resources secured environmental authorisation for all its activities in July 2012.

As Kunene sees it, this authorisation is valid until July 2017 and covers the construction of a jetty and expansion of the processing plant.

Kunene says that in December, mineral resources “became a competent authority on all activities related to mining identified in terms of Nema [National Environmental Management Act] . . . [the department] reviewed MSR-approved environmental management programme and the environmental authorisation they are currently holding” and found it complied with the rules.

But Tracey Davies, of the Centre for Environmental Rights, describes Kunene’s interpretation as “extremely worrying”. She says any changes to mining activity require specific approval in terms of the Environmental Management Act.

“If your initial mining application relates to an area of 300m², you can’t extend that to 600m² without first securing all the necessary approvals.”

However, that is effectively what the department has allowed the company to do, according to Kunene’s letter.

Davies said the letter contradicted what department chief director Rabone Nkamuble told the firm a month earlier. He said it needed approval for any changes to the plan.

Even Mineral Sand CEO Mark Caruso believed he needed approval for the changes to his mining operations, which is evident in a letter he wrote to the department in July seeking their green light.

In January, Caruso again wrote to mineral resources, this time claiming that an official of the Western Cape environmental and land management department “is biased against MSR” and was trying to

The department had a poor record of enforcing environmental regulation

stymie the company’s efforts to develop its mining operation.

The case is the first tangible fallout from the government’s decision to bring the regulation of environmental laws under the control of mineral resources — which environmental watchdogs warned against last year. In a submission to parliament’s mineral resources committee, they said the department did not have the capacity to implement these laws properly, and that it had a poor record of enforcing environmental regulations.

It created inherent conflict of interest, they said.

This week, Clarke said critics were not “anti-mining but we are pro proper procedures”.

Kunene did not respond to queries from Business Times. There was no response from mineral resource’s Western Cape or national office. Environmental affairs in the Western Cape did not respond. Caruso did not respond to e-mailed questions.