Five years ago, this village of 7,000, buried deep in the scrub lands of southern Mali, literally struck gold when a pair of South African companies opened the nearby Morila mine. But the school is not being built with dollars from Morila's nuggets, but with financial donations from Europe and the labor of African youth volunteers.

"When the mine opened, we thought we'd develop," Sanso's mayor, Dioting Mariko, said bitterly. "They've constructed 12 classrooms for four villages. And we've gotten a mosque. Besides that, there's been nothing."

Sanso's dashed expectations are reflected across the developing world, where low- and middle-income countries now extract two-thirds of the planet's gold. While dirt-poor Mali ranks near the bottom of just about every U.N. development indicator, it is Africa's third-largest gold producer, and ninth in the world. So fast has the industry grown over the past decade, that gold now replaces cotton as Mali's top export.

But rural communities like Sanso are only beginning to negotiate for a fairer share of the riches lying below the country's rust-red soil - and to make companies accountable for potentially devastating, long-term damage from mining operations, advocacy groups say.

"What's certain is we have the gold, and these companies need to extract it," said Tiemoko Sangare, who heads the Sahel Development Foundation, a Bamako-based environmental group working on developing community awareness in mining villages like Sanso. "We've embarked in this game, but so far we're losing it."

The Morila gold mine also offers a cautionary tale for villages once united in poverty, and now divided by wealth. Foreign miners and prostitutes, lured by new job opportunities, have more than tripled Sanso's population since Morila opened in 2000 - and likely brought in HIV/AIDS for the first time as well, local officials say.

"The mine has changed people's values," said 29-year old Mohamed Togola, a former school teacher from Sanso, who now works as Morila's community relations liaison. "It's created jealousy among people. A mine destroys socially as well as physically."

Jointly operated by two South African companies, Randgold Resources and AngloGold Ashanti, Morila has generated nearly $180 million in profits since it opened in October, 2000. The two companies each have a 40 percent stake in the mine. The Malian government has another 20 percent.

At Morila's air-conditioned headquarters, company executives offered a power-point presentation of the mine's operations and its contributions to Sanso and to three other area villages.

Besides the mosque and the classrooms cited by Mayor Mariko, the company says it has invested more than $1.2 million in a hodgepodge of development projects, ranging from upgrading a local health center to building community gardens and a rice paddy.

"Before the mine came here, do you know what the poverty was like in this community?" asked Morila's acting manager Samba Toure, a tall, middle-aged Malian, who showed a visitor the deep red crater of the open-pit mine. "Has this mine enhanced the well-being of the community? It has, 100 percent."

But while Morila and its miners' quarters are lit up at night, Sanso has no electricity or paved roads. And while some villagers, like 27-year-old Chery Mariko, have found well-paying jobs at the mine, many others have not.

"Working in the mine is very difficult," said Mariko, a miner who earns about $300 a month - a small fortune in Mali, where the per-capita income is about $250 a year. "But so far I've had no health problems. I don't know anybody who has."

But Josson Mariko, a bony, middle-aged woman on her way to work in the fields, and no direct relation to the miner, said Morila has offered nothing but broken promises.

"I used to work there washing clothes, but that's finished," she said, speaking through a translator in the local Bambara dialect. "None of my children has been able to find work either. So what interest should I have in this mine?"

Across the globe, however, local communities are taking an increasing interest in the gold mines operating in their midst - and exerting new conditions, with mixed results.

Mining communities in Peru and Indonesia, for example, have filed multimillion lawsuits against Denver-based Newmont Mining Corp. for mining-related environmental and health problems.

In early August, some 100,000 South African gold miners went on strike for better pay and working conditions. But in Ghana, local activists lost a battle this month to prevent Newmont from mining in a forest preserve.

In Mali, a strike for better pay by Morila miners last year resulted in the mine creating a one-time, $500,000 community development fund among other concessions, to be tapped after the mine closes in 2011.

"Communities are becoming more aware about what impacts these industries have, and what their rights are," said Keith Slack, a Washington-based mining specialist for Oxfam America. "It's in the early stages in a place like Mali, but its growing."

Mayor Mariko counts among a growing number of local critics. Clad in a blue safari suit, Sanso's 51-year-old administrator squatted with some two dozen local notables around platters of chicken and rice, after the school inauguration event.

"Every time we ask for something, they say they don't have the means," Mariko said of the Morila executives. "They tell us to draft proposals for development projects and prioritize them. We do, and the projects end up sleeping in drawers."

A 2005 World Gold Council report offers a glowing account of the industry's contributions to impoverished countries like Mali, suffering from a dearth of foreign investment. The mines spin-off food and service industries, and often bring in better roads, clean water and electricity, the study says.

Despite critics' claims to the contrary, large, transnational mining companies like AngloGold argue they follow roughly the same health and environmental guidelines in countries like Mali as in those like the United States -- an assertion the World Bank, which has established a set of international mining benchmarks, generally agrees with.

"There's an increasing pressure to follow [international] standards," said Clive Armstrong, a senior economist at the International Finance Corporation, a branch of the World Bank. Greater public scrutiny of groups like Newmont in their home countries, along with growing reluctance by large banks to lend to those with unsavory reputations, has helped clean up the industry's record, he said.

Still, watchdog groups point to a number of blights on the transnational mining ledger, from waste dumped in Southeast Asian water bodies to alleged human rights violations by a Congolese militia group reportedly supported by AngloGold.

In a June statement, AngloGold responded to the accusations by Human Rights Watch by saying individual employees had yielded to extortion without its knowledge in Congo's war-torn Ituri region. The company said it would consider withdrawing its operations there if the events reoccurred.

Many poorer countries have also failed to enact strict mining laws -- or to get companies to comply with those that exist, critics say.

Manager Toure says Morila will comply with international standards when it shutters its operations six years from now. But critics argue Morila may be breeding a host of invisible -- but potentially devastating -- long-term problems.

Among them: Sulfuric acid mine leakage to potential cyanide contamination from extracting gold, despite its cyanide treatment program. Beyond the $500,000 community fund, there does not appear to be any money earmarked to combat such hazards after Morila closes.

"These big mining projects can generate long-term environmental damage that could require millions of dollars to remediate," Slack of Oxfam said. "In most countries, there's very little provision or capacity to enforce any sort of environmental cleanup that might be necessary."

Togola, Morila's community relations man, has other worries.

"Personally, I fear the void," said Togola, who was born and raised in Sanso. "If no sustainable development projects are put in place once the mine closes, everyone will leave Sanso. The old people will be the only ones who stay."

All rights reserved. � 2005 United Press International. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by United Press International.. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of United Press International.

Related Links
TerraDaily
Search TerraDaily
Subscribe To TerraDaily Express

Thanks for being here; We need your help. The SpaceDaily news network continues to grow but revenues have never been harder to maintain. With the rise of Ad Blockers, and Facebook - our traditional revenue sources via quality network advertising continues to decline. And unlike so many other news sites, we don't have a paywall - with those annoying usernames and passwords. Our news coverage takes time and effort to publish 365 days a year. If you find our news sites informative and useful then please consider becoming a regular supporter or for now make a one off contribution.
SpaceDaily Contributor $5 Billed Once credit card or paypal		SpaceDaily Monthly Supporter $5 Billed Monthly paypal only