Emelia Amoateng speaking to a delegation from Oxfam America in the church in her village, Teberebie. Photo by Neil Brander/Oxfam America.

The first time I met Emelia Amoateng she introduced me to the members of the Teberebie Concerned Farmers’ Association. The farmers had recently been moved off their land by the Iduapriem gold mine, and were contesting the compensation they were offered by the company. “According to our law, no one should take anything away from you by force, but that is what happened here in Teberebie,” she said to me.

Teberebie’s fields are now buried under massive piles of grey waste rock. The farmers live in modest concrete homes the company built, and have to walk long distances (15 kilometers round trip) to their new fields where they grow oil palms, cocoa, pineapples, and other crops in the rich tropical soil. They live close enough to the mining operation that their homes crack from the blasting in the mine pit, but few of the people have been able to secure employment there.

When I first went to Teberebie in 2007, Amoateng and the others in the Association were in the early stages of what has become a 10-year legal battle. With help from Oxfam’s partners the Center for Public Interest Law and the human rights and environmental group Wacam, the farmers maintained their struggle, despite having little income as the case dragged slowly through the courts.

Oxfam America’s partner Wacam trains activists in the rights protected under Ghana’s Minerals and Mining Act. Photo by Chris Hufstader/Oxfam America

The case is now on the verge of being settled in court-ordered arbitration, so it is particularly tragic that Amoateng, 38, passed away earlier this month. Despite chronic asthma, she was an inspiring and dedicated leader, tirelessly defending the rights of her neighbors when innocent community members were shot by police, and documenting chemical spills so the community could get appropriate compensation for damages. When the proper authorities failed to do their duty to protect the lives, livelihoods, and property of her community, Amoateng reached out to the media and led demonstrations to call attention to the injustices being perpetrated against Teberebie. She did all this while taking classes to finish her secondary education, and raising two children.

“Our constitution says that if someone comes for your farm, they should negotiate and compensate you before they carry out a project,” she told me, showing me her copy of Ghana’s 2006 Minerals and Mining Act. Her training helped her hold the government and AngoGold Ashanti Mining company accountable for their actions.

Emelia Amoateng in 2007. Photo by Chris Hufstader/Oxfam America

I found out that Emelia passed away last week when I was in Senegal, driving from the eastern region Tambacounda back to Dakar. We stopped for lunch and I took advantage of a wi-fi connection to get my email, and I read a statement from Daniel Owusu-Koranteng, one of the founders of Wacam: “Emelia Amoateng, the great warrior of Teberebie and an icon of Wacam, has gone the way of all mortals. She died carrying high the resolve of Wacam to fight against irresponsible mining.”

Larry Fitzgerald (white shirt) and Anquan Boldin (right) help women artisanal miners pound rock and sand. Photo by Audra Melton/Oxfam America

The village of Sabodala in eastern Senegal is going through an amazingly difficult transition.  Until several years ago the community had access to land on which they farmed for generations. They had clean water whenever needed.  The land provided a means of livelihood for the community while villagers turned to artisanal mining for gold in the dry season to earn extra money.

Then a mining company came in and seized their land—and everything changed. People could no longer farm in the same places. They still had access to water through a pump the mining company was generous enough to build in the village – but not generous enough to let the community use for free.  Villagers say that sometimes the pump was shut off for days at a time.  Farmers in Sabodala  were forced to depend on artisanal mining for basic necessities in a way they never had to before.  Seemingly overnight, mining changed from a way to generate supplemental income to the only way to earn a living year-round.

I stepped into this situation with NFL wide receivers Anquan Boldin, Larry Fitzgerald, and Roddy White on a visit with Oxfam to learn about our programs in the region and what they, their fans, and you can do to support our friends and partners on the ground.

The players saw one of the ways the community of Sabodala has responded to their newly created situation: the creation of a women’s Saving for Change group by a local association that was also working with Oxfam to help farmers get compensation for their lost land and improve access to water. Each individual member of the group saves and deposits about 25 cents a week (roughly $12 each year) to the group fund. That seemed like a small amount to the players and myself, but when combined with the entire group savings, is actually a good sum of money to save in eastern Senegal.  The members can then borrow small loans to meet emergency needs or fund a small business venture.  The group has given the women access to resources they desperately need.

Changing for the better

We spoke with women who say their lives have been changed for the better through creating and accessing the savings group.  It is helping them open up new businesses, money for health care for children in the community, and getting new clothes. Although a savings group won’t solve all the problems in Sabodala, it will help people survive some difficult changes.

Read the rest of this entry »

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3BSPqJkwdI[/youtube]

As we’ve posted here  and written in our magazine (p. 7), Ghana civil society organizations have gained substantial ground in collaborating with their government to promote transparency in oil revenue. They can now see what taxes, royalties, and other payments the government collects, and monitor where that money is spent.

Here at Oxfam we have worked hard to support the work in Ghana to build a culture of transparency and good governance. We’ve complemented this work in Ghana with our advocacy in the US for the payment transparency provisions in the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (p. 8). These provisions are under threat in a law suit by the American Petroleum Institute (the lobbying arm of the US oil industry), which is seeking to block that entire section of Dodd-Frank, legislation passed by Congress and signed by President Obama.

What are the oil companies y trying to hide? This is the question posed by Boakye Dankwa Boadi in a video we released last week. The efforts of Mr. Boadi and others in Ghana to promote transparency and responsible governance are under threat. He sees legislation like Dodd-Frank as a measure that will help them check the money coming in to the government with payments reported by the companies themselves. He says this will help Ghana “cross the path of poverty” to becoming a more developed nation.

The court heard oral arguments last week, and we anticipate a decision in the coming months. Oxfam is calling for oil companies to publicly disassociate themselves from the API suit, and we’re asking you to sign a petition to support this.

Photo: Anna Fawcus/Oxfam America

Emanuel Gygmah (left), a representative from Simpa village on the local legislature, talks with women traders at a new market facility built there with money from Ghana’s mining royalties. Gygmah says Simpa is not directly affected by mining, but still deserves to enjoy some benefits. People in Ghana are asking their government to use mining and oil revenues to benefit all people in the country, so Oxfam America is working hard to support Ghanaians through the transparency provisions in the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. The law requires mining and oil companies to declare their payments to governments. This will help citizens to encourage their government to use their national wealth to fight poverty.

Right now US oil companies are suing to block these transparency rules in Dodd-Frank; you can send a message to urge oil companies to drop their support for the suit.

To stay abreast of Oxfam’s work to promote resource revenue transparency, “like” our Right to Know, Right to Decide Facebook page.

James Bogoloh (right), an elected member of the District Assembly in Jomoro in western Ghana, talking with Solomon Kusi Ampofo, who works with Oxfam's partner organization Friends of the Nation. Photo by Anna Fawcus/Oxfam America.

Out in Jomoro district in western Ghana, James Bogoloh is looking at what passes for a road through dense forest between two villages near his home in Takinta. He pronounces it “deplorable.” “If it rains it is just not passable,” he says, as a motorcycle carrying two men, one holding a machete carefully off to the side, bounces and sputters past. Bogoloh shows us a concrete structure meant to bridge a low, wet area, and says that the contractor is about to start grading the road surface.

Bogoloh is an elected representative and a volunteer community monitor who is working with Oxfam’s partner Friends of the Nation to teach local people how to ensure that government money from oil and mining revenues is used to improve their lives. His efforts in Jomoro are complemented by a national coalition advocating for better laws to promote transparency of resource revenues, so citizens can see where their national wealth goes.

They are making significant progress, but the track to transparency has its ups and downs: Read the rest of this entry »

If you want to begin to understand some of the challenges the Democratic Republic of Congo faces today, there’s no better place to start than with Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost, the history of the brutal exploitation of one of Africa’s most resource-rich nations. I read it a few years ago and instantly became a Hochschild fan, not only of his storytelling but also of his passion.

What, I wanted to know, makes Hochschild tick?

It wasn’t until last month, when I got my hands on Half the Way Home–a memoir and his first book–that I had the answer to my question. It’s the story of the sometimes difficult relationship between Hochschild, an only child, and his father, the head of a major mining company with interests all around the world. Raised in the kind of luxury familiar only to the top of today’s One Percent–house servants, chauffeur-driven limousine, a private summer estate in the Adirondacks–Adam Hochschild tells of his gradual awakening to what propped up that life of extreme privilege.

“All though it took a long time to sink in, growing up in such surroundings was the best political education I could have had. I did not need leftist theorists to convince me that class is the great secret that everyone wants to deny…As I grew older, I became more accustomed to this way of looking at life. What I mean buy that is an ever clearer perception of how the joys, the power, and the riches of the world are divided so unfairly: between classes, between countries, between races, between men and women. When you feel the injustice of that division in one category–and for me it was the first–then your eyes begin to open to the others as well.” Read the rest of this entry »

Residents of San Isidro (in Cabañas, El Salvador) look out over a valley where the Canadian mining company Pacific Rim proposed to mine gold and silver. Photo by Jeff Deutsch/Oxfam America.

There’s a legal battle underway in Washington right now, between the government of El Salvador and a Canadian mining company called Pacific Rim. Citing the threat of environmental damage, in 2009 the government of El Salvador denied a mining permit to Pacific Rim, which was planning to mine for gold and silver. So the company set up an office in the United States and is suing the government of El Salvador under the rules of the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA).  This has led to two years of hearings at the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes in Washington, DC.

There’s a lot riding on this case for the government of El Salvador, beyond the $77 million Pacific Rim is demanding in the suit, which is about one percent of the country’s GDP. El Salvador is a small, densely populated country where there is already a lot of stress on the surface waters on which the citizens depend for drinking and for agriculture. Large-scale industrial mining could have irreversible effects on the country’s fragile and diminishing resources, and a number of courageous people who have dared to organize resistance to mining have been killed.

However when El Salvador signed CAFTA, it became subject to rules that might prevent it from denying mining companies the opportunity to operate on the basis of public safety or environmental protection. Companies can claim this is like having their businesses expropriated. Read the rest of this entry »

Oxfam America is running banner ads on news web sites this week to encourage oil companies to support strong rules that will encourage more transparency in the industry.

A week ago we launched our latest effort to promote transparency in the oil, gas, and mining industries with an on-line petition calling on oil companies to stop blocking new rules by the Securities and Exchange Commission designed to implement the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Bill. Since then more than 14,000 people have signed the petition, and hundreds of our supporters are sharing their views on Twitter and Facebook to help us promote the campaign.

The objective of the campaign is to encourage strong rules that will respect the law and honor the intent of Dodd-Frank: make payments by oil, gas, and mining companies to governments public so that people in poor communities producing precious natural resources can get a sense of where all the money goes.

It’s surprisingly difficult to track this money. In 2007 I visited a town in far western Mali and asked the mayor a question: how much of his town’s US$500,000 annual budget comes from the massive gold mine in his town? He could not say. Read the rest of this entry »

Small-scale miners look for gold near Romtom. Photo by Chris Hufstader/Oxfam America

If you go to a meeting in the community of Romtom, don’t be surprised if you hear some contradictory information about the effects of industrial mining on the indigenous Kuoy people here.

A foreign-owned company is moving in to mine iron ore on nearly a thousand square kilometers of land, and taking up community-held land used for growing rice, as well as small-scale gold mining. The Kuoy people here are also concerned about the loss of forest land. The “spirit forest” is an integral part of their culture as well as an area where they gather nuts, fruit, and other products they can sell.

“So far we’ve had some issues between the company and community,” says So Sea, the commune chief and an ethnic Khmer. “But these have been resolved. Presently there are no problems.”

One minute later Ouk Kong, one of the elders of the Kuoy village here paints a different picture. “One area where we used to pan for gold has been lost to the company, and in another area we can’t plant rice anymore. It’s making life very difficult here.” Read the rest of this entry »

What would I do for a cause I believed in? Wear a pin or a t-shirt? Sure, no problem. March in the streets or shiver in a tent, a la Occupy Wall Street? Maybe—if it was something really important.

But what if speaking up endangered my life? What if my fellow activists faced threats, or even actual violence, because of our actions? Would I keep going anyway, or be scared into silence?

Big questions, but those are the kind of things I’ve been asking myself since I met Francisco Pineda last week.

Pineda, an Oxfam America partner and recent winner of the prestigious Goldman Prize, led a citizens’ movement to protect El Salvador’s land and water from the harmful effects of a gold mine. He’s one of six Goldman Prize winners featured in a documentary called The New Environmentalists, narrated by Robert Redford and premiering starting Sunday on PBS stations around the country. “The new environmentalists are making personal sacrifices that most of us can’t even imagine,” says Redford in the trailer, below.

In Pineda’s case, that’s definitely true. Though he comes across in person as an unassuming guy, the story he told when I interviewed him was pretty shocking: A community’s only source of clean water being pumped away by a gold mine. A mining company scientist trying to convince people that cyanide isn’t poison. A leader living with 24-hour police protection because of repeated attempts on his life—and mourning his friends and fellow activists who’ve been killed for speaking out. Read the rest of this entry »