Illegal gold mining clears 140,000 hectares of Peruvian Amazon

"An illegal gold rush has cleared 140,000 hectares of rainforest in the Peruvian Amazon and is accelerating as foreign, armed groups move into the region to profit from record gold prices, according to a report. About 540 square miles of land have been cleared for mining in the South American country since 1984, and the environmental destruction is spreading rapidly across the country, Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP) and its Peruvian partner organisation, Conservacion Amazonica, found."

"Illegal miners use dredges floating machines that chew up and spit out riverbeds leaving the toxic mercury used to extract gold from sediment in their wake. Ultra-high resolution aerial images allowed MAAP to identify dredges alongside deforestation for the first time, enabling them to identify goldminers and revealing that the environmental crisis once confined to the south of the country was creeping north."

"We used to only see it in the Madre de Dios region but now we're seeing it everywhere, said MAAP's director, Matt Finer. The price of gold topped $4,000 for the first time this week on the international markets as global anxiety increased about financial fragility. Indigenous groups have sounded the alarm that as the price of soars, armed groups were increasingly tearing down their forests and poisoning their rivers in pursuit of the precious metal."

Illegal gold mining has cleared about 140,000 hectares (540 square miles) of Peruvian Amazon rainforest since 1984, and deforestation is accelerating across the country. Illegal miners use floating dredges that destroy riverbeds and release toxic mercury used to extract gold, contaminating waterways and bioaccumulating in fish eaten by local communities. Ultra-high-resolution aerial imagery has revealed dredges alongside deforested areas and shown that mining is spreading beyond Madre de Dios into northern regions. Rising gold prices above $4,000 and the arrival of foreign, armed groups are driving expansion. Indigenous communities report forests being torn down and rivers poisoned in pursuit of gold.

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