So today we had the lapdog Peruvian Environment Minister, Antonio Brack-Egg (crazy name, crazy guy) stating that he was looking to promote alternatives to mercury for gold extraction/refining in the enviro-wasteland Madre de Dios region. Apparently he's all concerned all of a sudden (because the disaster area is finally making headlines) and also ssay that part of his protfolio is to recover the 32,000 heactares lost to the goldrush so far.
This is utter tripe as usual. Let's look at the latest official production figures out of MDD, according to the Mining Ministry and while we do, keep in mind that the unofficial production is estimated to match the official numbers. Here's the monthly production from MDD....
...and this chart (featured before) is the one that takes official MDD production as a percentage of Peru's total product.
So yep, it's got slightly better in the last two months since that jawdropping spike, but it's still way way above the historical average for the region and there's still scant progress being made by Peru to combat this filth. The reason for that is simple enough; The bunch of two-faced moneygrabbers running the country don't give a rat's ass. DYODD