Samartex Timber and Plywood Company Limited is raising concerns about the increasing threat of illegal mining to its core operations.
Management says the company’s concessions have come under attack, as the expansion of unregulated mining disrupts its timber harvest and water production.
Managers tell Joynews the operations of illegal miners have forced the company to suspend a multi-million cedi ecotourism project.
Several residents of Wassa Amenfi West Municipality depend largely on Samartex for employment, as the company maintains over 2,000 employees.
But illegal mining activities are severely compromising the company’s long-term harvesting plans.
The miners are eating into the concessions of Samartex as hundreds of commercially valued tree species are decimated before harvest teams could arrive.
“Mining is really impacting our activities and our livelihoods. One, now places that we have earmarked for harvesting are now non-existent, it’s no more there, because we make plans before we go anywhere we harvest our trees. And this is the case, you make plans that this year I’ll go here and before you get there the resource is gone,” Head of Forestry, Justice Eshun told Joynews.
The illegal mining activities have affected the forest resources but the company’s water infrastructure, as water treatment from the Tano River for both internal industrial use and for surrounding communities has come to a halt.
“Our water source, were depending on the Tano and treating it for use in the company and also in the in the communities. But now the Tano is such that when you want to treat it for human use, then the cost is just too outrageous, so we cannot depend on that Tano River anymore,” Mr. Eshun said.
Apart from the pollution of the Tano River driving the cost of water treatment, a situation which has forced the company to invest heavily in sinking of boreholes, the environmental degradation has also derailed ambitious ecotourism initiatives centered on the Tano River.
Head of the Forestry Department at Samartex, Justice Eshun, says Samartex had earlier engaged the services of an expert from Brazil to assess and develop a major eco-project featuring Canopy houses on trees along the Tano Riverbanks.
“We are struggling to even get workers to work in the company because the mining is not regulated, people just go in for easy money and they think that is what they have to do. So now, even getting workers to work is also a big challenge that we are facing”.
Overwhelmed by the invasion, the management of Samartex has been supporting the operations of the Forestry Commission’s Rapid Response Team to deal with the influx.
Though 100 illegal miners are arrested each month, officials are unhappy over the slow pace of prosecution.
Mr. Eshun explains:
“We even brought an expert from Brazil to do the assessment, but we couldn’t continue because of the current state of the stream. When you come to Samatex now, we have a structure along the Tano built totally from wood; it’s such a beautiful thing, but now it can only be there as a white elephant because nobody will come and see a brown Tano River. So that is the challenge. All our dream; all the things that we wanted to do in terms of ecotourism has been dashed because of the current state of the resources or the Tano River.”
The clear waters of the Tano River, which revealed white stones underneath it 15 years ago, have now turned brown due to heavy siltation and pollution.