The Minister of Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation, Professor Kwabena Frimpong Boateng, says the government will roll out a programme to enforce the law on illegal mining.
The programme, he explained, would be implemented in phases, with the first phase focusing on illegal miners who operate in rivers with heavy duty machines.
Prof. Frimpong Boateng said this when he opened a four-day African Regional Workshop on the “Building Resilience through Innovation, Communication and Knowledge Services (BRICKS)” project in Accra yesterday.
The BRICKS project, which is a six-year programme, aims at improving the resilience of landscapes and people’s livelihoods, thereby contributing to poverty reduction and curbing the degradation of natural resources.
The workshop
Organised by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the workshop brought together technical experts and media from 12 African countries to help build a network of people who will be equipped with communication tools to disseminate information on land and water management.
The countries are Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, Ethiopia, Ghana, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sudan and Togo.
Prof. Frimpong Boateng said the activities of ‘galamsey’ operators polluted water bodies with mercury and cyanide, which posed a threat to human lives.
Their activities, he said, also left the rivers silted, making them impossible to hold the volume of water that they were supposed to carry, a situation that could lead to flooding.
Illegal activities
The activities of those galamsey operators, he said, were also causing land degradation, leading to droughts in many places, especially the northern part of the country.
He said the rationale behind the programme was also to restore water bodies which had been polluted and were, therefore, choked and unable to hold more volumes of water for use during the dry season.
The Project Officer of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD), Mrs Saadia B. Owusu-Amofah, in a welcome remark said the workshop was a follow-up to an initial engagement held in Lome last October, to strengthen the capacities of journalists and other stakeholders from countries on sustainable land and water management.
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