GENEVA, Sept. 26, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- As 156
countries convened for the first meeting of the Conference of the
Parties to the Minamata Convention, a new UN report shows mercury
mining skyrocketing in the last 5 years. Moreover, much of that
mercury is used in artisanal and small scale gold mining (ASGM),
the largest source of global mercury pollution.
"The emergence over the past five years of new small-scale
producers of mercury in Mexico and
Indonesia has made a difficult
situation worse," said Satish Sinha,
Associate Director at Toxics Link in India. "Between these two countries alone,
around 1000 tonnes are produced annually."
An analysis of publicly available UN COMTRADE data over the
period 2013-2016 reveals that the majority of global mercury flows
from commodity trading centres (such as Hong Kong, Singapore and the UAE) to developing country
regions (such as Africa and
Latin America) where mercury use
in ASGM is prolific in response to the largest global gold rush the
world has ever seen.
"In recent years there have been a number of shocks to the
global market, resulting in a doubling of the price of mercury in
the last 12 months alone," said Michael
Bender, Co-coordinator of the Zero Mercury Working Group and
director of the Mercury Policy Project. "In addition, EU and US
export bans now in place have resulted in a major shift in the main
trading hub to Asia."
Currently, countries do not have reliable information about
trade in neighboring countries and within their own region. This
problem is compounded where borders between countries are "porous,"
and a significant portion of trade is informal or illegal. For
example, mercury may enter a region through legal trade to one
country, but then be traded illegally across borders to neighboring
countries.
"Informal trade is difficult to track, and therefore does not
appear in the official trade statistics," said Elena
Lymberdi-Settimo, Project Manager, Zero Mercury Campaign at the
European Environmental Bureau. "With timely reporting, Parties can
better understand mercury flows in order to better enforce trade
restrictions in the Convention."
"The main objective of the Minamata Convention is to protect
human health and the environment by, in part, simultaneously
reducing mercury supply and demand," said Rico Euripidou,
Environmental Health Campaign Manager at GroundWorks in
South Africa. "Without adequate
reporting on the global movement of mercury it will be difficult to
monitor the overall effectiveness of the Convention."
"Annual reporting is consistent with the requirements of other
environmental conventions such as Basel and the Montreal Protocol," said Leslie
Adogame, Executive Director at Sustainable Research and Action for
Environmental Development in Nigeria. "Legal trade flows must be understood
before informal or illegal trade can be adequately addressed."
For more information:
http://www.mercuryconvention.org/
https://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/21725/global_mercury.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
http://www.ifeh.org/wehd/
www.zeromercury.org
For further information, please
contact:
Michael Bender,
mercurypolicy@aol.com
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SOURCE Mercury Policy Project