Artur (not his real name) is showing us the cracks in the mud-brick walls of his house. They appeared after mining company Sigma Lithium began using explosives to open up fresh extraction areas in their open-cast mine. The mine lies a few hundred metres away from the village of Piauí do Poço Dantas. On the other side of a small river, community members bathe and wash their clothes.
‘They have been doing the explosions at night, and now no one here can sleep at all,’ a neighbour tells us. From the front of Artur’s house, we can see the wind whipping up dust clouds from the huge spoil heaps that tower over the river. Another neighbour tells us that the dust not only contaminates the water, but blows into the village, where respiratory complaints are becoming increasingly common.
We are in the heart of ‘Lithium Valley’, as the governor of the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais has rebranded the Jequitinhonha valley, a remote and historically marginalised part of this huge and mineral-rich state. This is a region with a long tradition of mining, with strong folk memories of the gold and diamond rushes that happened during the Portuguese colonial domination from 1500 to 1822. The region’s traditional inhabitants, many of whom identify as quilombolas – people whose African ancestors escaped the slave economy of coastal Brazil – often combine subsistence agriculture with small-scale artisanal mining of precious stones.
Mining companies are not a new presence. For many years, Artur worked for CBL, a Brazilian lithium mining company that has operated in the region since the 1990s. Unlike Sigma, however, CBL uses an underground mining technique that creates much less surface destruction. According to an interview with a Sigma engineer recorded by Klemens Lachewski, a German geographer at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in the state capital Belo Horizonte, the company is well aware that underground mining would have a much smaller environmental impact. Instead, it has opted for the more destructive open-pit production because it is so much cheaper.
Green lithium
Sigma markets itself as the world’s greenest lithium producer. Its CEO announced at the climate conference in Dubai that the company was running a ‘quintuple zero’ operation. This was on the grounds that it consumed energy generated with zero coal-burning, made zero use of hazardous chemicals, used zero potable water, deposited zero waste in tailings dams and emitted zero carbon.
Some of these claims seem designed to distract attention from the company’s actual environmental footprint. For example, drawing water from local rivers has a significant environmental cost in this drought-prone region, whether or not the water is subsequently treated. And while spoil heaps may not risk disastrous tailing dam failures of the kind that have devastated other regions of Minas Gerais, they bring hazards of their own – including the flying dust that locals say is contaminating their water and their lungs.
However, Sigma’s marketing has proved remarkably successful in a capitalist world desperate for ‘green economy’ good news. The zero-emissions claim, in particular, may even enable Sigma to sell carbon credits on the increasingly febrile global offset market. Its green sales pitch has helped the company to attract investors via a high-profile listing on New York’s Nasdaq exchange, and to present itself as a suitable target for acquisition by major lithium consumers with a need to burnish their green credentials, such as Volkswagen.
According to the International Renewable Energy Agency, 54% of energy transition minerals and 80% of lithium projects are located on or near indigenous peoples’ lands
Sigma’s green credentials have also been enthusiastically promoted by Minas Gerais state governor Romeu Zema, who launched his ‘Lithium Valley’ project alongside the company’s CEO. Zema’s government has continued to promote a stigmatising narrative that emphasises the Jequitinhonha valley’s poverty and claims that only private investment in large-scale resource extraction operations such as Sigma’s can offer salvation to the people who inhabit the region.
This narrative is vigorously contested by many of the region’s traditional communities, who in addition to quilombolas include Pankaruru, Aranã and Pataxó indigenous people. They emphasise instead the need to value the region’s social diversity and the cultural riches expressed through its famous craft traditions, as well as the sustainable livelihoods that they derive from the biodiversity of the Jequitinhonha valley’s fragile forest-savannah mosaic.
Widespread tensions
This biodiversity is threatened by the large-scale removal of surface vegetation that could follow from the planned expansion of Sigma’s operations and the granting of additional open-pit mining licences. Extraction licences have already been requested for lithium deposits that extend into an environmental conservation area as well as the traditional territories of several indigenous and quilombola communities.
These communities’ land rights are often precarious, as many traditional forms of collective tenure are not recognised under Brazilian law, and they are increasingly suffering violence and intimidation from land-grabbers keen to profit from the boom in critical minerals. Even when their land rights have constitutional protection (as is the case for the quilombolas and indigenous people), communities can face years of delays before government bureaucracies formally recognise them, leaving them in a legal limbo that the mining companies are quick to exploit.
This collision between the precarious hold of indigenous and other traditional communities on their territories and the powerful forces seeking to profit from the capitalist ‘green transition’ is not taking place only in Minas Gerais. According to the International Renewable Energy Agency, 54% of energy transition minerals and 80% of lithium projects are located on or near indigenous peoples’ lands – many of which have not yet secured formal recognition.
Recent research by the Institute of Development Studies in Chile and Argentina has highlighted a growing groundswell of opposition to extraction of lithium and other critical minerals from indigenous and other traditional communities and their civil society allies. This has left billion-dollar investments snarled up in court cases. Even the most progressive governments have struggled to navigate this storm of contestation. No sooner had Chile’s leftist president Gabriel Boric announced in January this year that the state would take a majority stake in strategic lithium producer SQM to improve environmental standards and increase community participation than a protest by several hundred people blocked access to SQM’s operating area in the Atacama salt flat, site of the world’s largest lithium deposit. Extraction of critical minerals has increasingly become a tinderbox of environmental justice, labour and legal conflicts, as the traditional inhabitants refuse to allow their territories to be turned into sacrifice zones for the ‘green transition’.
This article is based on data collected as part of ‘Revisioning territorial rights in Brazil in the face of resource extraction’, a project funded by the University of Sussex through the Sussex Sustainability Research Programme
