South China Villagers Slam Pollution From Rare Earth Mine

Guangdong. We all love Guangdong. The shopping. The tourism. The factories. The people. The Guangzhou zoo. The…rare-earth minerals? This week, we learn through RFA’s Cantonese service, Guangdong villagers are fighting an illegal rare-earth mine in their neighborhood which they say has poisoned the local water supply and wiped out their fish-farm stock and rice crops. China produces the vast majority of the world’s rare earth elements, which are needed for high-tech manufacturing processes. It also consumed around 60 percent of the 108,000 tonnes of rare earth oxides consumed globally in 2006, while the U.S. used around 10 percent. Global demand for rare earth elements is forecast to grow by between 9 percent and 11 percent per year over the next few years. China’s domestic demand is expected to match its own supply by 2012, causing upward pressure on prices. Around 600 residents of Shangmankeng village, near Heyuan city in the northeastern part of the province, have had their lives devastated by severe pollution from the mine, according to one campaigner, identified only by his surname, Li. “Local officials, corporations, and triads [Chinese criminal organizations] are all in cahoots on this, otherwise this project would never have gotten off the ground,” Li told RFA’s Cantonese service.

“The rice crop that was already sown has totally failed. We can’t work. The water supply we depend on for drinking water isn’t reliable. We can’t use water for our day-to-day needs, like fish-farming. There are no fish left now,” he said. “They have all died. Every single one, in a reservoir measuring tens of thousands of cubic meters of water.”

China is one of the world’s biggest producers of the “rare earth” category of metals, which include cerium, thulium, and lanthanum, and are often found in deposits alongside uranium ore. Illegal mining for the lucrative minerals, which are used to manufacture high-tech goods, is a massive environmental problem around Heyuan, where the authorities say they staged a major crackdown in October, closing 462 illegal iron and rare earth mines.

Last February, the Shangmankeng village committee handed over management of the village reservoir, on which villagers depend for irrigation, fish-farming, and drinking water, to three villagers who are known to have triad connections, Li said. At the same time, the authorities put out a tender notice in the name of Shangmankeng village and the nearby Dongyuan township to operate a rare earth mine in the village. Since then, the once clear waters of the village reservoir, which were also used as a fish farm, have come to resemble a pool of sewage.

Li is just one of the villagers who are vehemently opposed to the mine. Government scientists discovered the uranium, which is used to make nuclear weapons, under the hill near the village back in 1981, and they sealed it off, forbidding anyone from mining there. Now that they have begun work there, large volumes of mud have flowed into the village reservoir, some of it radioactive, he said. He said the villagers had been writing to the township government, the city government, and the provincial government about the problem for the last year, but to no avail. Li and his family have left their homes in Shangmankeng because of the pollution, fearing for their health.

Heyuan’s Dongjiang River is one of the sources from which neighboring Hong Kong buys its water. Chan Yu-fai, who manages a water quality-testing project in Heyuan for the Hong Kong-based environmental group Greenpeace, said the problem of illegal mining in the Heyuan area was very serious and had resulted in a lot of runoff of rare earth and sand from the mines into nearby rivers.

“Uranium is radioactive, and harmful to human health. All heavy metals [including rare earth elements], but especially the radioactive ones, are harmful to all forms of life,” Chan said, although he was unable to say which mines contained uranium deposits. “The radioactive ones can cause genetic mutations, and it accumulates in the tissues of plants and animals,” he said.