Local Protesters Are Killing Big Oil and Mining Projects Worldwide

Source: Motherboard

Oil companies have destroyed and polluted some of Ecuador's Amazon rainforest. Image: Jason Koebler

Multinational corporations are infamous for pushing native people off their land in order to open a new gold mine, extract oil, or otherwise extract local resources. For decades, backlash has been thought to be both limited and ineffectual, but new evidence suggests that protests from local people are effective, extremely costly for the companies, and often lead to substantive changes to or total abandonment of a project.
Researchers at the Centre for Social Responsibility in Mining interviewed employees at several dozen major international corporations who are involved with extractive activities, and found that companies are increasingly having to deal with the social and environmental impacts of their work, and that it’s hurting them where it hurts most: their bottom lines.
The researchers, led by Daniel Franks, took a look at 50 planned major extractive projects (oil drilling, new mine construction, that sort of thing) and found that in fully half of them, local people launched some sort of “project blockade.” In 40 percent of the projects, someone died as a result of a physical protest, and 15 of the projects were suspended or abandoned altogether, according to Franks' study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“There is a popular misconception that local communities are powerless in the face of large corporations and governments,” Franks said in a statement. “Our findings show that community mobilization can be very effective at raising the costs to companies.”

The number of projects in the study sample affected by local action. Image: PNAS

The reason these projects, such as the Minas Conga gold mine in northern Peru and Lanjigarh bauxite mining project in Orissa, India, were abandoned wasn’t borne out of some sense of social responsibility to not pollute the environment or to not push people off their land. It was because the protests and resulting government backlash was so great that it became financially unviable to move forward.

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