El Salvador bans metal mining

a. South Africa

b. El Salvador

c. Canada

d. US

 

Lawmakers in El Salvador voted overwhelmingly on 29th March 2017 to prohibit all mining for gold and other metals.

This makes the country the first in the world to impose a nationwide ban on metal mining, environmental activists said.

Declaring that El Salvador’s fragile environment could not sustain metal mining operations, legislators across the political spectrum approved the ban, which had broad support, particularly from the influential Roman Catholic Church.

Supporters said the law was needed to protect the country’s dwindling supply of clean water.

The vote in the Legislative Assembly turned a decade-old moratorium on mining into law, halting efforts by international companies to tap the gold belt running across the northern provinces of El Salvador.

The law does not apply to quarrying or the mining of coal, salt and other nonmetallic substances.

Other countries are unlikely to follow El Salvador’s national ban, mining watchdog groups say.

But the law sets a powerful example to communities that oppose large mining projects and bolsters the case against mining in environmentally delicate areas.

Around the world, scattered bans on the use of cyanide to extract gold from low-grade ore, commonly used in open-pit mining, are in place, including in Montana.

Costa Rica has a national ban on open-pit gold mining.

Germany, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Turkey and several Argentine provinces have cyanide bans.

In the Philippines, the government ordered more than half the mines to shut down or be suspended.