Greeks ask if recovery must trump environment $ELD #Gold

El Dorado gets some more bad publicity for its Greek mine. 

From The International Herald Tribune:

Greeks ask if recovery must trump environment

BY SUZANNE DALEY

IERISSOS, GREECE — In a forest near here, bulldozers have begun flattening hundreds of acres for an open-pit gold mine and processing plant that a Canadian company hopes to open within two years. The company, Eldorado Gold, has also reopened other mining operations in the nearby hills, digging for gold, copper, zinc and lead.

For some local residents, all this activity, which promises perhaps 1,500 jobs by 2015, is a blessing that could pump some life into the dismal economy of the surrounding villages in this rural northeast region of Greece.

But for hundreds of others, who have staged repeated protests, the mining operations are nothing more than a symbol of Greece's willingness these days to accept any development no matter what the environmental cost. Only 10 years ago, they point out, Greece's highest court ruled that the amount of environmental damage mining would do here was not worth the economic gain.

''This will be a business for 10, maybe 15 years, and then this company will just disappear, leaving all the pollution behind like all the others did,'' said Christos Adamidis, a hotel owner here who fears that the mining operations will end up destroying other local businesses, including tourism.

''If the price of gold drops, it might not even last that long,'' Mr. Adamidis said. ''And in the meantime, the dust this will create will be killing off the leaves. There will be no goats or olives or bees here.''

Tensions over new development programs are being felt elsewhere in Greece, too, as the country stumbles into its sixth year of recession, eager to bring in moneymaking operations and forced by its creditors to streamline approval processes. Environmentalist are objecting to plans that would sell off thousands of acres for solar fields and allow oil exploration near delicate ecosystems.

''We see laws changing, policies changing,'' said Theodota Nantsou, the policy coordinator of the World Wide Fund for Nature in Athens. ''We see things getting rolled back under the guise of eliminating impediments to investment. But over the long run all these things will have a heavy cost.''

The fund says standards are being ignored or lowered virtually across the board, affecting air, water and land use. Worries include a reduction of mandatory environmental impact reviews, plans for increasing the use of coal, and the likelihood that 95 percent of an environmental fund — more than a billion dollars collected for projects like improving energy efficiency and sustaining nature conservancies — will be absorbed into the general government budget.

In June, the fund issued a report saying it was witnessing an ''avalanche of serious environmental losses.'' It said some rollbacks were an attempt to fulfill the demands of the troika of creditors — the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the European Commission — that have been sustaining Greece in recent years. But it said that, to an equal extent, the losses were due to initiatives put forward by various ministries.

But no project appears to have elicited more of a public outcry than the resumption of mining operations in the mineral-rich hills here, where legend has it that Alexander the Great also mined for gold. Past mining operations here have been boom-and-bust enterprises that swung with the price of metals and left behind ugly piles of sandy gray tailings.

But perhaps as much as anything, the anger over the mines is a reflection of the fundamental distrust many Greeks feel toward their government, firm in their belief that most officials are busy enriching themselves, their friends and their families at the expense of the country.

One columnist, Nick Malkoutzis, writing in the conservative daily Kathimerini, said it was hard to blame villagers for their distrust, when so often companies had been allowed to ignore regulations. ''Perhaps in another country, locals would feel more comfortable with the project because the process for awarding public contracts or environmental certificates is transparent and trustworthy,'' he wrote.

Opponents complain, for instance, that while making the deal with Eldorado, the government failed to ensure that Greece received a percentage of the earnings, a common practice in mining contracts.

And they believe the $50 million letter of credit the government secured as a guarantee against any problems is not nearly enough. A spokesman for Eldorado, Kostas Georgantzis, said the company had actually offered more, but that was all the government wanted.

Until recently, environmentalists were beginning to feel optimistic about Greece. Green issues dominated the political agenda after George Papandreou was elected prime minister in 2009. He established an Environment, Energy and Climatic Change Ministry and appointed a noted environmentalist to head it. He talked with enthusiasm of eco-tourism and renewable energy.

But as Greece's financial problems snowballed, the head of the ministry was replaced by the former finance minister, George Papaconstantinou, who is now embroiled in a scandal over whether he removed family members from a list of Greeks with Swiss bank accounts. Shortly after his appointment, the permit for mining was issued, though it is still under review in the courts.

Officials of the Environment Ministry, in a written response to questions, acknowledged that they were overhauling regulations with a view to making ''modern environmental policies'' go hand in hand with much-needed investments. But they said the World Wide Fund for Nature's report was ''excessively negative'' in its conclusions.

They also defended the decision to reintroduce mining in the Chalkidiki area, in which Ierissos lies, saying that northern Greece constituted a ''wealth reservoir'' of metals worth more than €20 billion, or $27 billion. It said the permit was issued after an eight-year period of preparations, evaluation and public consultation that ensured that the mining activity would not damage the environment.

In fact, the officials said, the new activity would ensure that the acidic runoff from abandoned mine operations would be averted and modern practices of waste management put in place. The ministry officials said they were unable to explain the letter of credit because the official in charge of that was on vacation.

Eldorado has big plans for the region. It intends to invest €1 billion in various mining operations there, and its executives expect mining activities to last 15 years or more.

But some opponents question that, too, noting that right now the price of gold hovers at $1,700 an ounce, making even the tailings left behind by past mining efforts valuable. Eldorado is already at work reprocessing those tailings, which still contain about 300 grams, or 11 ounces, of gold per ton. But the new open pit mine is expected to produce only 100 grams per ton. What will happen if the price of gold drops, they ask?

Eldorado officials say the villagers need not worry because the open pit mine will also yield copper. But the villagers are not so sure.

The new mining operations have divided the region. Most often it is those who live close to the sea, where tourists arrive in the summer, who oppose the project and those who live in the hills, where there is little work, who support it.

''These jobs mean that the barber and the doctor will have work too,'' said Kostas Karagiannis, who has been working at clearing the forest. ''It is not just the miners who benefit.''

But opponents of the mines worry about dust and groundwater pollution. In the last year, opponents, many of them retirees, have staged more than a half-dozen demonstrations, some of which have been broken up by the police with tear gas and rubber bullets.

Both sides point fingers. Mining officials say the villagers surrounded city hall and kept the mayor imprisoned for eight hours at one point. But the villagers say that during one particularly large demonstration at the end of October, when 21 villagers were arrested, the police used brutal tactics.

Rania Ververidis, 62, who with her husband retired to a small cabin a block from the sea near the mines, said that she had been ordered out of her car and told to kneel. At that point, she said, a police officer had stomped on her ankle. She was still limping three weeks later.

But she said she intended to protest some more. She fears that Greece is in the process ''of selling everything.'' ''We can't let that happen without doing anything, '' she said.

Dimitris Bounias contributed reporting.