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Argentina passes law to protect glaciers and limited mining

Argentina's Congress became Act early Thursday a project supported by environmental organizations that protect sources of fresh water from glaciers and imposes severe restrictions on the mining sector with strong foreign investment.

Argentina's Congress passed into law early Thursday a project supported by environmental organizations that protect sources of fresh water from glaciers and imposes severe restrictions on the mining sector with strong foreign investment.

The initiative, submitted by the Chamber of Deputies, was passed in the Senate by 35 votes to 33 against with one abstention. Its provisions prohibiting mining in areas of glacial and periglacial along the long common border of 5,000 km with Chile.

The boundary Andes "is the water factory, where they originate large watershed to the Atlantic and Pacific. What goes up, down and drained. If contaminated low, will affect crops, fauna and the ecosystem," said the environmental leader AFP Javier Rodríguez Pardo.

The government of President Cristina Kirchner freed their legislators to vote on the rule, to consider a split between senators from the provinces with mining operations, which supported a project less restrictive, and that propelled the preservation of glaciers.

The project (approved) "is marked by the denial of mining" said before the debate José Luis Gioja, Governor of San Juan (west), where the Canadian firm Barrick Gold operates the mine of gold and silver Pascua Lama, an Argentine-Chilean venture located at 4,000 meters high in the Andes.

The alternative project of a group of senators who drove Gioja and other governors was rejected by the same amount of votes, 35 to 33 with one abstention, minutes before the penalty, after eight hours of debate.

Rodríguez Pardo, of the NGO National Ecological Action Network, said that mining produces "directly on 11% of global warming."

environmental expert gave the example of La Alumbrera mine (from Swiss capital) in the province of Catamarca (northwest), which uses the equivalent of "80% of energy consumed in the province of Tucumán (north, the sixth of the country), with all its industries."

Argentina is the fourteenth-largest gold producer and is expected to be among the top ten in 2011, according to the Government Secretariat of Mining.

gold production in the South American country grew 6,000% between 2003 and 2008, after giving to overcome the worst economic crisis in its history in 2001 when the financial system collapsed and the country declared the biggest 'default' debt contemporary by almost 100,000 million dollars.

The mining operations are spread over eleven provinces located in the foothills area.

A similar bill to become law on Thursday had been passed by Congress in 2008 but vetoed by Kirchner, whom environmentalists consider the provinces affected by investments in mining.

law this time was a green light from the Casa Rosada (government), but the debate in both the divided waters of the ruling Peronist bloc and the opposition.

"Those who defended the mining industry did not want any laws (...) which encompasses the country's ecosystems," he told AFP María Eugenia Testa, policy director of Greenpeace.

Under the new law, the National Institute of Snow Research and Glaciology establish rules for the protection of glaciers and periglacial environment in order to preserve them as strategic reserves of water for human consumption and agriculture.