News

Grant for gold conflicts research in the Amazon

Anthropologist Marjo de Theije of the Social and Cultural Anthropology department was awarded a 600.000 euro grant for comparative research on small-scale gold mining in five Amazonian countries.

Financing was awarded to her application in the call for Integrated Projects entitled "Small-scale gold mining and social conflict in the Amazon: Comparing states, environments, local populations and miners in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Peru, and Suriname (GOMIAM)” in the CoCooN-program (Conflict and Cooperation over Natural Resources) of WOTRO, a division of the Netherlands Organisation of Scientific Research that supports scientific research on development issues.

Small-scale gold mining causes conflicts over rights to land and about the exploitation of mineral resources. Over the last few years, the rush for gold has increased worldwide and with particular intensity in the Amazon basin. The rising profits yielded by small-scale mining are attracting local peoples and migrants to the gold fields, as well as big (transnational) mining companies. These developments provoke conflicts over the access to gold deposits and the distribution of their benefits, and intensify pressures on local populations and the natural environment.

The project will analyse such conflicts, with a particular focus on the (power) position of miners, local populations, migrants and other outsiders, taking into consideration the public policies, national legislations, political and economic processes, and the role of environmental degradation, in and between the five Amazonian countries.