Gold mining in Brazil
Gold mining in Brazil has taken place continually in the Amazon since the 1690s, and has been important to the economies of Brazil and surrounding countries. In the late 17th century, amid the search for indigenous people to use in the slave trade, Portuguese colonists began to recognize the abundance of gold in the Amazon, triggering what would become the longest gold rush in history. This gold rush was also characterized as the first one in the modern century, making the region a very important step in gold mining around the world. The news of latent gold in Brazil flooded the area with foreigners around 1693-1695. Despite the influx of money and political power this generated, it did not facilitate proper construction of mining institutions, therefore much of the collection was inefficient. Due to the already profitable agricultural operations taking place in the east, many Brazilians had been sent into the jungle as part of several agricultural reform programs. The methods and practices have changed in the following centuries and the work is often dangerous and detrimental to the surrounding ecosystems. Because artisanal mining is prohibited under federal law, the methods employed are often crude and unregulated, resulting in polluted water and massive deforestation.
More recently, partly due to the increasing price of gold, small-scale mining activity increased by 300% from 2000 to 2010. Illegal miners had been emboldened by the policies of former President Jair Bolsonaro, who opposed the protection of indigenous populations living in areas targeted for mining.
History
In the 1690s, colonists known as Bandeirantes hunted the countryside for indigenous people to capture for the slave trade, and gold was discovered. The discovery changed the history of eastern South America, expanded the use of indigenous and African slaves in the Portuguese colonial regions of the continent, and contributed to the borders of present-day Brazil. Gold was found in the present-day state of Minas Gerais.Unlike other gold rushes in the world's history, the Brazilian Gold Rush lasted the longest, from the 1690s into the 19th century. In contrast to the 1840s−1850s California Gold Rush, which helped the United States establish a new "Industrial Revolution" era infrastructure, the Brazilian gold rush saw mass migration but little new non-mining infrastructure in the colony. Much like other gold rushes around the world of the era, the natural resources received notable environmental degradation from the mining process. What sets the Brazilian gold rush apart is that the consequences of losing environmentally crucial resources did not hinder the mining of gold.
Between 1693 and 1720, some 400,000 Portuguese and 500,000 slaves relocated to southeastern Brazil to mine gold. Such was the growth that, by 1725, half of Brazil's entire population was residing in Minas Gerais. The excitement of the thought of instant wealth brought many people to the mines. The Brazilian Gold Rush also provided a new excuse for slavery to thrive as thousands upon thousands were forced to do the work, while the slave/mine owners prospered.
The Gongo Soco gold mine, operated by the Imperial Brazilian Mining Association of Cornwall using skilled Cornish miners and unskilled slaves, produced over of gold between 1826 and 1856.
The initial Brazilian Gold Rush lasted until the late 1800s. Present-day village residents known as garimpeiros still try to make a living from gold mining.
Brazil's modern illicit gold mining industry
The Amazon rainforest is widely recognized as being of great environmental and economic value for local communities and the world at large. However, human activities which contribute to its rapid deforestation persist. Brazil's illicit gold mining industry began to fully blossom in the 1950s, consequently making the Amazon a focal point for the Brazilian Government. Up until this point, the traditional means of accessing the Amazon were via waterways. However, while this somewhat sufficient for exploratory purposes, if the government were to extract resources in abundance, then it would need a more convenient means of access. The solution was to build a network of roads and highways penetrating the forest, thus allowing not only mass settlement in the region, but also the opportunity to extract resources quickly and effectively. This was also seen as a way to prevent further migration in the south of Brazil, because highly successful agricultural operations were already underway and the government wanted to avoid any conflict between farmers in the region.Management of the rainforest's resources began to take shape with Brazil's Agrarian Reform Program. The program, established in the 1970s, has since trans-located approximately 1.2 million settlers, mostly into Amazonian hinterlands. Available records indicate that between 1995 and 2011, 1,235,130 families had been trans-located into 8865 settlement projects, those of which account for roughly 10.3% of Brazil's territory. Though only 13% of those families have been relocated to Amazonia, this program has still been heavily taxing on the Amazon. This is due, in large part, to the lackluster enforcement of environmental regulations by the government. Though Brazil's Ministry of Agrarian Development presides over the land allocations and regulations that stipulate the rules landowners must adhere to, they fail in ensuring cooperation. For example, in an assessment from 1985 to 2001, of 4,340 agrarian settlement projects, only 43% retained the mandated environmental buffer established by the ministry. Also, Brazilian Amazonia reported the highest rates of illegal timber extraction. This resulted in a situation in which the Brazilian Environmental Agency repeatedly fined the federal agrarian agency. Thus, there ensues a case in which government agencies that preside in overlapping jurisdictions fail to clearly define multilateral policy objectives, which ultimately produces inefficiencies.
When this rural-rural migration took place, the land that the migrants were allotted was often infertile. Once they found that the land they were allowed to farm on was not yielding consistently, they saw the need to make use of the entirety of their allotment, thus leading to the deforestation of the required riparian buffers. However, even after having made use of the entire plot, they did not realize any substantial production. It is this series of events that has led many to resort to illegal mining.
Gold mining is explicitly illegal in the Amazon according to official federal mandates, however, it persists due to the lack of government oversight described earlier. Another big part of why the government isn't able to enforce policies on the artisanal mines however is because they cannot find the, since a lot of them are located in remote areas in the jungle. One maneuver that gold prospectors have been employing is to pay local village leaders to 'guide' them through the local forests. Because the government does a poor job of patrolling the forest, the local chiefs are the informal gatekeepers and can essentially control who has permission to mine. This dynamic is a newer emergence, however. After the initial Amazonian development boom took place in the 1970s, many of the indigenous Amazonian tribes took action against the exploitation of the forest. These efforts largely took place in the 80s and achieved marked success. Among the victories that local people enjoyed was a greater emphasis on the conservation of the forest itself and the limitation of mining. Many developers took little issue with the limitation of mining practices because, at the time, the price of gold did not render it worth the hassle. In the early 21st century, the price increased greatly, thus making the risk worth the potential reward. Not only does mining, in general, contribute to deforestation, but the crude methods used in 'wildcat mining', specifically, poison the ground and surrounding water supplies.
However, while the market for gold in the Amazon is technically an illicit act, those who mine in the Amazon are simply meeting a real global demand. The global demand for gold rose in 2019 to 2,351 tonnes following increases from, among others, China and India. Additionally, gold accumulation by official sectors rose 75% in 2018.