At peak capacity, its owners say, it could produce as much as 2 million tons of the stuff—worth roughly $100 a ton—each year, to be shipped off and smelted abroad. What's left of it after refining—some 60 percent of the ore that arrives from Madagascar—will be sold for $2000 a ton as titanium dioxide, a pigment used in everything from white paint and tennis court lines to sunscreen and toothpaste. At current levels of demand, the Fort Dauphin mine will provide 9 percent of the world supply over the next 40 years, amounting to more than $60 billion of titanium dioxide. Even that is a conservative estimate: demand for ilmenite has been growing at 3-5 percent annually, with major mines slated to close in coming years and few untapped sources known worldwide.
Google Earth satellite image of the mining area. Image acquired on Sept. 19, 2004.
As befits a project of this scale, Rio Tinto has developed a large, sleekly-designed website to promote the mine and accompanying port, not as beacons of industrial achievement and profitability, as one might expect, but as but as presenting tremendous "conservation opportunities," which, the reader will discern, is not the same as conservation.
While conservation simply involves protecting existing swaths of the natural world from further degradation, creating 'conservation opportunities' requires a lot more groundwork. In order to create conservation opportunities near Fort Dauphin, Rio Tinto will use a floating dredge to pull up deposits of sand to a depth of 20 meters over an area of nearly 6000 hectares of coastal forest and marshes over the next forty years. As a result, they will have the opportunity to put all vegetation aside and "store the topsoil for use in rehabilitation," or "forest restoration"—reseeding the closed mine with key species the company found in the original forest. Extracting titanium dioxide from beneath 6000 hectares of forest and wetlands has also given the company the opportunity to turn 977 hectares of habitat into three widely separated conservation zones, to be exempted from mining in order to "protect several dozen species from extinction." It remains to be seen whether the three conservation zones in question will be large enough to sustain the species that live there.
Ringtailed lemurs are found in the Fort Dauphin/Tolagnaro region.
And yet, reading on, the entire website seems devoted to conflating conservation and conservation opportunities. The slogan "Net Positive Impact" on biodiversity appears throughout Rio Tinto's writings on the project, which boast of "Conservation Areas" and a "Conservation Committee" as well as an "Ecological Research Centre" and full-scale trials of "ecological ecosystem restoration."
Rio Tinto ranked at the top of its field in last year's Dow Jones Sustainability Index. In Fort Dauphin, their subsidiary QMM has committed to reforesting large tracts of land around the mine in order to provide a more sustainable source of charcoal and wood for construction. It has partnered with a broad set of NGOs in a program to promote vegetable farming in the region, which in turn will reduce locals' dependence on the existing forests for their sustenance and their income. So it is important not to hurl mud at the company's efforts to mitigate the environmental impact of what is, by and large, an ecologically disastrous industry. QMM may indeed be better than the rest, and there are signs that Rio Tinto's practices are gradually improving. But reading the company's glib accounts of its commitment to biodiversity, something does not compute.
In the way of a growing number of corporations operating large-scale industrial projects in beautiful places, Rio Tinto leans heavily in Fort Dauphin on the social capital afforded by the idea of environmental or biodiversity offsets (BDOs), actions taken elsewhere to counteract the negative ecological impacts of a given project. As a recent article in Mining Magazine put it, "BDOs can contribute to developing a social license to operate." Offsets might also be described as trading "conservation opportunities" (read devastation) at a mining site for genuine conservation efforts in another area.
In the face of the largest investment in its history, the Malagasy government is unlikely to act as a watchdog on the EIA.
Offsets seem logical enough—mining will inflict a certain amount of damage on the landscape, and mining companies should be held to account both for cleaning up the mess and for compensating for the damage their project entails. But offsets can also be a distraction from the stakes of a particular project: protecting antelope in Montana will never bring back the wolves you lose in Idaho, and offsets take for granted the premise that the existence and scale of the offending project are non-negotiable. Moreover, offsets invite companies to make measurable tradeoffs in the service of a concept—biodiversity—to which the very idea of trades is alien. How does one calculate the value of a lost plant or animal species? How does one calculate the value of a biodiversity offset?
From Rio Tinto's literature: "The total residual impact is calculated by measuring the area and quality, or condition of habitat, of biodiversity value likely to be lost after the mitigation hierarchy has been followed." In order to establish the likely residual impact of its project, Rio Tinto conducted "extensive baseline research" on-site in the late 1990s in preparation of the environmental impact assessment it submitted to the Malagasy government in 2001.
Mongabay.com is an environmental science and conservation news website.
