Mining, Land and Territories Digging Deeper: Conversations on Mining and Just Transitions

As mining for critical minerals expands, rural communities face new threats. Two activist-scholars examine land’s meaning, policies for justice, and the struggle for sustainable, equitable mining tied to the renewable energy revolution.

Authors

Longread by

  • Sai Sam Kham
  • Itayosara Rojas
Illustration by Fourate Chahal El Rekaby

Illustration by Fourate Chahal El Rekaby

Mining and land politics

Yukari: Thank you both for joining me! Could you begin by telling us about the relation between mining and land politics in the territories where you and movements you are connected to work? 

Itayosara: I do my research in the Colombian Amazon, which is now home to different rural and indigenous communities: nomadic, semi-nomadic, and recently settled indigenous communities. It is home to afro-descendant black communities that were attracted to the region during previous ‘commodity booms’. There are also white and mestizo peasant communities who have been pushed into these areas. This is the history of many land reforms in Latin America: instead of redistributing the most fertile and productive lands, policies were aimed at colonizing a new agricultural frontier. All these communities share the same territory and relate in different ways to each other, to land and to natural resources. 

Each of them has different agricultural practices. Many indigenous communities, practice so-called ‘slash-and-burn’ agriculture [where a plot is cleared and cultivated for a relatively short period of time, then allowed to return to forest for a longer period]. That is how the soil and the landscape of the Amazon has been made. But now slash-and-burn agricultural practices are being blamed for increasing deforestation. This is a narrow perspective that doesn’t acknowledge the role of these practices for communities and the ecosystem. Increasing deforestation is not linked to indigenous communities and their traditional livelihoods or agricultural practices but to other more recent changes.

That is why I link this to the global dynamics of the ‘land rush’. [‘The land rush’ refers to the growing pressure on land due to a wide variety of economic and social factors, including increased demand for minerals]. Sometimes these manifests as land grabbing, but pressure on land can also take other forms. We have a portfolio of different economic activities happening right now in the Amazon: extraction of oil, or large hydrocarbon projects, but also speculation around rare minerals. This is really important. A decade ago debates around coltan [a mineral ore that is important for electronics and a source of niobium] gained a lot of momentum. There was widespread information saying that coltan was available in some parts of the Amazon. However, we didn't have the technology to establish for sure where. 

Indigenous communities in need of income participated in extraction without knowing if they would actually find it or not, based on speculation and rumours. This had a big impact, because they started switching away from agriculture, small-scale forestry and collection of forest products to mining, without having a real base to do so.

These repeated previous patterns of commodity rushes or booms in the region. In the end of the 19th and first half of the 20th Century, we had the ‘rubber rush’ here in the Amazon, remembered as one of the most bloody episodes for indigenous communities. It worked through an indebtedness system, in which a third person arriving in communities provided them with materials to start production and extraction. Then the indigenous communities had to pay them back. With this new cycle of mineral extraction, especially gold, we returned to this same system of indebtedness. Most people come from Brazil, giving tools such as gasoline or a chain saw for communities to start production, and then the community becomes indebted to this person. That is really an unequal exchange. 

Mining of rare minerals, especially gold, in the Amazon is now also linked to illicit economies, specifically the coca trade in Colombia. We are experiencing a sort of coca crisis, because coca prices are decreasing. Coca is part of a larger portfolio of illegal activities or economies in the hands of non-state armed groups. So, when coca prices fall, gold prices rise, and these criminal entrepreneurs change from coca trade to gold trade. 

Also, most gold mining happens near rivers, where the land is most fertile and suitable for agriculture. So communities are losing access to the most fertile land. The few places where they can engage in agriculture for self-consumption are being taken for mining. 

Sai Sam: Thank you so much Ita. The link between the coca crisis and the rise of gold mining makes sense also in the area where I am working. My current research focuses on Northern Shan State [in Myanmar], but as a social worker, my experience is also in Kachin state, in the northern part of Myanmar, bordering China. These areas are both linked to China in terms of trade, movement of labour, movement of goods, and minerals and other raw materials. 

Myanmar is located between India and China, with a long history of over 70 years of civil war. In 2011, the conflict in northern Myanmar started again, after the first general election in 50 years. We had what we call a democratic transition between 2010 and 2020, but in 2021 there was a military coup and the country is in crisis at the moment. People are resisting the military take-over, and the military is losing a lot of their territory. Ethnic armed revolutionary groups, as well as students and professionals are staging a civil disobedience movement as well as a very strong, loosely coordinated armed resistance. More and more territories are being taken over by these smaller armed resistance groups. Other large areas are being controlled by the ethnic armed revolutionary groups. So this is the current crisis in Myanmar. 

In terms of land grabs and the land rush, we see two waves. In the 1990s the transition from a socialist military dictatorship partially opened the country and invited foreign investment. The government issued the “Wasteland Instructions” [classifying some land as unused and available for development, in a disputed process]  and granted land concessions to investors. The rise of opium cultivation in Myanmar around that time is also very much linked to this. So the dynamics of illicit crop cultivation are similar in Colombia and Myanmar. China's opium eradication policies also affected Myanmar. 

From 2008-9 to 2013-15, there were a lot of land concessions granted. Over 1 million acres of land were given to the private sector and individuals. There is no such thing as 'wasteland' or 'unused land' or 'wilderness' in Myanmar, because people depend on the forest and natural resources, using it in their own ways through informal or customary land tenure and practices. 

Renewable energy, climate change and global climate change politics affect Myanmar because we are part of the international community. In the transitions of the 1990s and 2000s, huge parts of the land in Shan state were transformed completely. Traditionally, we practiced agroecological farming – you grow what you eat. But as we started transitioning into cash crops, for example maize, it completely changed the landscape. Maize is an export crop, and what we call flexcrop, or flexible crop: it can be food, animal feed or energy, linked to biofuel production.

So, land grabs are very much linked to opium policies and green energy policies, through the expansion of maize and sugarcane plantations. It's a very visible transition there.

After Myanmar's transition to democracy started in 2011, they issued a law called Vacant, Fallow and Virgin Lands Act in 2012. This opened up land to land grabs. Individual land titling, land concessions and commodification of land accelerated land grab in Northern Shan State. Mining is linked to that, similar to the experience in Colombia with gold mining. Gold mining is large across Myanmar, and in Kachin state jade mining is a billion-dollar business. 

Rare earth minerals, particularly heavy rare earth elements (HREE) for electric vehicles and wind turbines are heavily produced in Kachin state and Northern Shan State, particularly in the Wa region. Both areas border China, the importer of these materials. In 2023 alone, the value of HREEs from Myanmar to China was 1.4 billion, over 40 thousand tonnes. And to produce that, 'in situ leaching' is used: they bore holes in the mountain and pour in chemicals, including oxalic acid and ammonium sulphate. In 2023, Myanmar imported 174,000 tonnes of oxalic acid and 1.5 million tonnes of ammonium sulphate from China for this purpose. All these chemicals poured into the mountain go to the watershed and water systems. The labour and workplace safety situation is also really bad. A few weeks ago, there was a landslide in the rare earth mining area and over 30 people were killed. These areas are also linked to ethnic armed resistance, and ethnic armed revolutionary groups are very much involved in gold and rare earth mining, and tin mining in the case of Wa state. Wa state exported 48,000 tonnes of tin to China in 2023. 

In the end, finished products, such as electric vehicles or wind turbines, produced by China, are used throughout the world, and all these areas where we have conflict are producing, extracting and exporting minerals to support the green energy needs of the rest of the world. The impacts of pollution and conflict related to mining, however, is being borne by ordinary people and peasants in Myanmar, ethnic minorities who are already facing big problems because of conflict and displacement. 

Illustration

Land struggles and mining in the Amazon

Yukari: Thank you so much for sharing. How are communities, indigenous people and local organizations responding to this in your different contexts? 

Itayosara: Communities are not homogenous in the Amazon, and they have different ways to gain access to land. Indigenous land struggles, black communities’ land struggles and peasant land struggles do not have a common ground that can tie them together. So, the responses to mining are also different. In some cases, indigenous communities take an active part in mining, because they see it as an income possibility. Black communities also have historical links to mining. But in some cases, peasants are against mining, and oppose it directly. The responses are individual and depend on the context. 

Sometimes, rare alliances between people within the territory can also form. In one of the cases I have been working on, some landless people started an alliance with cattle ranchers against oil extraction. Cattle ranchers turned against oil extraction because [companies] have to run lots of pilots before they start. These pilots produce small-scale earthquakes, affecting their lands, and sometimes killing cows. So alliances can happen.

Now, it’s not clear if we can move towards a consensus of all the communities against mining. Because, as I was saying, there was a period almost a decade ago in which rare earth minerals became very trendy and lots of communities wanted to engage in the new ‘boom’ (and bust) cycle. But the responses can be broad. Most cases when communities are against mining, they need an alternative. And often, the alternative is green initiatives, carbon offset schemes. There are many examples, but these alternatives are not always as fair as we might think. 

These complexities make us think about how people react, how they engage with these economies, and how they see and understand possible alternatives. When a community engages in a carbon offset scheme, they can no longer use the forest as they used to. So this new momentum of extraction creates unfairness in the whole landscape. The extraction can be of something material and visible, like gold or oil, or the extraction of something we don’t see, like the measurement of carbon. 

Currently, 54% of the total area of the Amazon has been considered suitable for REDD+ [forest-based carbon capture] projects. This is in the northwest region of the Amazon, called the ‘north arc of deforestation’, where deforestation rates are actually increasing. REDD+ projects are now taking place there, and people living there could engage with REDD+ initiatives and in that sense more or less stop mining and deforestation. But that’s not happening: mining is continuing and deforestation rates continue increasing. So [REDD+] is a fake solution because it doesn’t address the issue. However, rents are being extracted from these places. So someone wins and someone loses due to a socio-ecological problem that has not been fixed yet, because all these solutions are actually part of the problem and not addressing the problem. 

The impact of land grabbing in Myanmar

Yukari: Very interesting, indeed false solutions, aside from not addressing the problem, can also further extraction in other ways. Sai Sam could you speak to the question of responses?

Sai Sam: Thank you. It’s interesting to hear about the carbon offsetting. In Myanmar there is also a huge land grab: 300,000 acres in the Southern part of the country linked to palm oil plantations, and another 300,000 acres in the northern part for cassava plantations linked to biofuels. These land grabs happened two decades ago, but the area designated for cassava plantations is also claimed by the World Conservation Society as the world’s largest tiger conservation area. So, we see green grabbing happening. And in the tiger conservation area, gold and other mining is also happening. The Hkakaborazi National Park [in Kachin state] has also recently been expanded in the name of carbon offsetting. It is an important biodiversity area in the northern part of Myanmar, with snow-capped mountains. It deserves to be protected, but people are not being part of the solution. Internal colonization and oppression of indigenous people continues there, causing loss of access to land and other natural resources they have been using for generations. 

We keep seeing international solutions that don’t work in the local context. Some of these solutions are based in the North, where there is democracy, stable administration and governance. But in parts of Myanmar, access to education and basic essential services are missing. Many children don’t have schools, clinics or hospitals. 

I would say communities and people are responding in two ways. Working as a social worker during the democratic transition was a rude awakening for me. We had long been struggling for a democratic transition, and we finally had the first election- in 2015 we voted for the government for the first time, even though the Constitution limited peoples’ ability to influence political positions due to unelected military personnel still sitting in Parliament and making policies, laws and all that. But the elected civilian government was very much for taking land from small-holder farmers and giving it to capitalists and corporations. They made very pro-corporate land policies. So, the struggle for land, natural resources and against mining, occurred in many different ways. Some groups tried to form political parties to compete in the elections. Some tried to do policy advocacy to change policies. Civil society groups tried to use existing international platforms, such as the EITI, Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, learning about the systemic corruption in the jade, gold and other mining sectors.

Those who grabbed the land and are conducting mining, are the same people sitting in parliament and making laws and policies about mining. They are also the same people regulating mining; the same people taxing mining. They are the same people controlling the export and port authorities. So, basically these state-owned enterprises are controlled by the Myanmar military, or retired personnel from the military. Civil society organizations started to learn this. Without controlling and transforming this sector, any democratic election or transition will be a fake one. The military will always be in control and in power.

People also tried to advocate to the ethnic armed revolutionary groups, because they control large territories where mineral deposits are located. A lot of unregulated mining is happening there. These groups need to finance themselves through this mining, and at the same time, the military is profiting from this mining. That explains the long civil war in Myanmar. Many people started to call it ‘ceasefire capitalism’, or ‘khaki capitalism’, because capitalist expansion is very much linked to the conflict and peace situation in Myanmar. 

Some groups tried to use the FPIC (Free Prior and Informed Consent) processes, but we all know the problems with FPIC. Even when people get consulted, they have limited information and don’t have the power to stop groups taking their land. People also resisted mining, land grabbing and extraction by forming a people’s movement, such as the Land in Our Hands movement or other indigenous people-oriented resistance. This was possible because of the democratic opening. 

But all of this changed after the 2021 military coup. The political debates in Myanmar now are about federalism; about greater autonomy where local people can decide policies, laws and mode of development that are going to affect them. People think that federal democracy is the only way local people can control these things. But without the awareness of social structures, social relations, and what is already there, federal democracy alone will not solve our problems. The concern is that the federal democracy we talk about is very much ethno-nationalist inspired, so people try to protect people who are similar to them, or ‘belong’ to them, excluding others who don’t. 

There has been a lot of military resistance with ethnic armed revolutionary groups taking huge territories. But the concern is that those who have guns have the power. So we really need to go back to the more democratic base. I understand that for the time being, taking down the military dictatorship is the first priority. But it’s worrying that the armed resistance groups are also extracting minerals, grabbing land, going against the will of the local people. We are already seeing some communities clashing with the ethnic armed revolutionary group who they supported their whole life, giving their children to fight successive military dictatorships. They supported these institutions for over 50, 60 years, and they are now turning against them, grabbing their land and doing rare earth mining. We have seen many clashes between the Kachin community and the Kachin Independence Organization movement in the northern part of Myanmar. At one point the chairman himself came out to apologize to the community. But jade mining and rare earth mining is still a very important source of income for these ethnic armed revolutionary groups to fight against the military dictatorship. So, these are very complex situations.

Myanmar has a Bamar majority and other ethnic minorities. Many minority leaders who control huge territories see federalism as the only way of having power-sharing, resource-sharing or revenue-sharing. The ethnic minorities have long felt that they reside in a huge and mineral rich territory, but whatever is extracted from the region is not fairly distributed. 

Development projects - transportation, large infrastructure, electricity, healthcare provision, education - were happening only in the majority-controlled areas. Meanwhile, ethnic minority areas are usually difficult to reach in terms of transportation and geographical location, and have been kind of forgotten. Resources are being extracted from them, but they don’t get anything. So it’s about redistribution, and also about the provision of services and legitimacy of a governance. So this is where the inspiration [for federalism] comes from.

But the debate is also very much ethnically inspired. Shan people may feel that a Shan government will be fairer to them. We understand the rationale, but there is no guarantee that a Shan government will be fair to everyone living in Shan state. This is the ongoing debate: ‘what will the federal units look like?’. Shan state is also a very ethnically diverse state, and many groups are calling to make it into a federated Shan state. So a federal system within the whole national-level federal system. It is a very complex situation. 

Itayosara: I would like to follow-up on two key points. The first one is about the division between legal and illegal, especially in extraction processes. Sometimes the mainstream discourse blames only illegal extraction activities, and not the legal, where in fact they are deeply inter-linked. For instance, most of the extraction in Colombia happens in a sort of blurred part, and most policy targets the illegal part. However, all this illegal production ends in the hands of large-scale legal international actors. So the division between legal and illegal is false, while what is common to both is the expansion of capitalist relations.  

We also need to come back to the relationship between political economy and political ecology. When some NGOs in Colombia talk about gold extraction, they focus on whether we, the public, are wearing gold jewellery. But most gold extraction goes into the international reserve of gold of foreign countries, not for jewellery. So the political economy is concerned with: what happens to the gold in the end? What is produced? Who gains what? Who gains the profit from this? It’s not the same if these products are produced for large-scale for international trade or for a short-circuit of trade. They have different impacts on socio-ecological relations. 

On the complexities around federalism that Sai Sam mentioned, here in Colombia, we do not have the question of federalism, but we have the question of decentralization, giving space for regions that have been marginalized in the national project. But we cannot romanticize this - decentralization can end up giving more power to local elites. It’s not just a matter of centralization or decentralization: power dynamics don’t follow a single national logic. As Sai Sam said, federalism is not going to solve all our problems, including the problem of democratization in our society. The same with decentralization in Colombia; it will not resolve the question of how to redistribute access to resources, how to redistribute wealth.

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Closing remarks

Yukari: Do you both want to say some closing remarks?

Itayosara: One way we, as scholar-activists, can act upon these conflict dynamics is to recognize that it’s not just about one single case in one state, or one country. It’s a structural, global dynamic, transforming and changing every day. So, we need to also elaborate global common goals to pursue struggles for land access and fairness in the distribution of natural resources. We need a common blanket for all of us. 

There are some elaborations in that direction, like ‘agrarian climate justice’ that considers environmental and climate dimensions of land struggles, and the meaning of transition in the countryside. To have just transitions in the sectors of energy, mining, we need a transition in agrarian social relations. So that’s how this umbrella or blanket of ‘agrarian climate justice’ might be helpful, and also its 5R’s [Recognition, Restitution, Redistribution, Regeneration, and Representation/Resistance] as principles. 

The 5Rs can take different forms in different parts of the world. In the Colombian Amazon I have explored them in the sense that: we need redistribution of land that is highly concentrated or is used in ways that are not beneficial for people or ecosystems, like cattle or oil palm. We also need the restitution of rights - including land rights - for people who have been dispossessed because of the armed conflict. Not the restitution of the single land plot, but of the whole rights around that. We need the regeneration of soils that were used in terrible conditions, degraded and made unsuitable for sustaining the life of people. We also need the recalibration of our socio-ecological relations: we need to think of alternatives that are fair with us, and as part of nature. And the last one is representation, which means that a just transition in energy, mining and agrarian settings, must be in the hands of the people who live there. It must be in the hands of indigenous peoples, black communities and peasants in the case of the Amazon.

Yukari: Thank you so much Ita. Sai Sam, do you want to add to what Ita said about the 5Rs? Or about global common goals?

Sai Sam: Like Ita said, the phenomena we are seeing are not just local but very much linked to global phenomena of renewable energy, green energy, climate justice and expansion of capitalism. When we started working with peasant communities in Myanmar, people would feel that the issue was too big, that you could not do anything. But we also cannot just ‘think global act local’. ‘Act local’ is not enough. A local person can do something but, in the middle of the land rush, it matters that this is a global phenomenon: the World Bank’s sudden interest in land and agricultural investment; the geopolitical currents affecting us through China. China is interested in railway access to the Indian ocean and providing energy to its provinces, such as Yunnan, with oil and gas pipelines through Myanmar. Ethnic revolutionary groups are increasingly controlling the area, being hugely influenced by China. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the China-Myanmar economic corridors are seen as opportunities for economic development, but the concern is what will happen for people, small farmers, peasants and the environment. 

Myanmar is also a very food insecure country. People say that it is due to the conflict, because we have more than enough land and water. But there are many questions around the way we produce food and conduct our economy. We are starting to talk about food sovereignty, what Via Campesina has been advocating for a long time. Food sovereignty is not just about food production. It is also about sovereignty of land and sovereignty of seeds. A lot of the solutions in Myanmar are revolving around ethnic federalism, federal democracy. But, as Ita was saying, the ‘5Rs’ - recognition, redistribution, restitution, regeneration and representation - are very important principles. 

People are hoping for a democratic transition: a federal constitution and federal elections to control our autonomy, future, resources, mining, all of that. But we also need to think about fair representation of the people affected by the expansion of mining, and regeneration of communities so that they have the power to conduct their own affairs. That includes regeneration of ecology, but also regeneration of political organizations. Regeneration of economy is very important, and regeneration of the spirituality which binds people together. We cannot just use a democratic transition model from the West, we also need to understand what brings people together in this part of the world. Spirituality is a very important part of it.

Myanmar has a history of over 70 years of civil conflict and mass displacement. For the Rohingya people in the western part of Myanmar, for the Shan, Karen and Kachin people who have been displaced for over 30, 40 years, there are land disputes between those who were displaced and those who took over these lands. So, land reform and especially land redistribution is very important and complex. 

Finally, solutions that fully hinge on electoral democracy are not enough. Election in Myanmar is 4-year kind of cycle, and there is no democratic government who has the courage to take over land reform, for example, or talk about redistribution of wealth and control. The current political structures, the current social and class structure, will not allow this. No political party has the courage to do that and face the backlash. As someone coming from the agroecology movement and humanitarian work in conflict areas, these solutions have to link with the democratic transition. We want to see democracy not only in terms of electoral democracy and electoral transition, but transition in the social structures also. How do we bring people together in political struggle, among small peasants and migrant labourers? It does not matter if it’s a military dictatorship or ethnic armed revolutionary groups taking over territory, as long as ordinary people have no say, this is not a democracy. Land - land reform, land redistribution - is at the foundation of all the changes that we want to see, the just transition that we want to see.

We used to have a people’s movement for land rights in Myanmar, and now the hype is ‘those who hold the weapons have the power’. But the urgent question is: how are we going to communicate with the ethnic armed revolutionary groups who are controlling territory now? Some people call these groups ‘non-state actors’. But I kind of disagree because they are basically forming a new state. They have political and military power, and administration of the land and natural resources. So we need to work with them to make sure they understand the political economy of resources, of mining and other extraction, towards greater fairness and justice.

Many tonnes of rare earth minerals are being extracted from Myanmar. Because of the nature of illegality or conflict kind of minerals, these groups are receiving a fraction of the market price. It’s cheap because they are doing in situ extraction methods, a very reckless way of doing mining. 

China also needs to consider about buying unregulated minerals from Myanmar. They can pressure suppliers to adopt more environmentally friendly ways of extraction. But for us, the local people, polluting industries that are not benefitting us must be stopped, at least until we have a democratic government, and these industries can be regulated. 

Who are the end-users of electric vehicles or wind turbines? Countries with green energy policies, global supply chains where rare earth minerals from Myanmar are being used for wind turbines and such. So the responsibility and solution should not depend only on Myanmar people. It needs international action to trace the origin of minerals, the conditions under which they are being extracted, and think about accountability. 

These are important, concrete and practical things to organize a people’s movement. In Myanmar, what is more practical for us at the moment is to approach these different power centres and try to shift the way of thinking and how they conduct mining and mineral extraction.  

Yukari: Thank you so much Sai Sam. Indeed, at the local level it’s very difficult for international movements to monitor and know what’s going on right now, or how to push for greater accountability. 

Sai Sam: I would like to share that all the information that I have and provided is being researched by local and international researchers. Particularly for the Myanmar researchers, it’s a very risky business. In some of the rare earth mining areas in the Northern Kachin, whoever enters the region must leave their phone. If you are not the local people, you are not allowed to go in. I would just like to say that there are groups and people taking risks to monitor and to inform us, and to help us strategize and organize our resistance, our strategy for fair and just energy transitions. 

I have said less about the labour conditions in extraction process: workers lack any protection, suffer daily exposure to toxic chemicals, without paid pension, and limited access to land for their own use. We also need to think about labour in terms of solidarity. Chinese labour in China, or Myanmar migrant labour working in these industries, refining to produce batteries for electrical bikes for example. We often focus on extraction itself, but labour is also critical.

Yukari: Thank you so much Sai Sam and Ita for sharing your time and knowledge.