Appetite for sand is fuels a crisis

New report describes roving bandits and looted coastlines

| THE INDEPENDENT | We may run out of sand if we do not start paying attention to sand as a resource that needs research, management and governance. That is the conclusion from a study by researchers from the University of Ottawa in Canada and Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg in Germany.

Next to water, sand is our most consumed natural resource. The global demand for sand and gravel stands between 40 billion and 50 billion tonnes annually, according to the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), and its scarcity is an emerging global crisis.

The demand for sand is only expected to rise. Urbanisation and its need for concrete, land infill, asphalt and glass is fuelling sand exploitation the most. The global urban population, expected to grow to 5.2 billion by 2030 from 4.4 billion today, will sustain the global construction boom, where sand is the key ingredient for concrete.

Sand is also needed to manufacture items such as computers, mobile phones, medical-grade glass vials, which are used to hold vaccines, toothpaste, detergents, and cosmetics. The industry already faced shortages even before researchers began developing a coronavirus vaccine. And conflicts over sand are emerging in Florida and other seemingly sand-rich areas.

Conflicts over sand were dramatically depicted in the 2013 movie `Sand Wars’ which is credited with inspiring the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to release the 2014 Global Environmental Alert.

As sand markets boom, entrepreneurs, organised crime and other groups have emerged to cash in, often using cheap labour and driving widespread habitat destruction and coastal, riverbank and delta erosion.

“If we do not change our habits, and encourage the development of “green concrete” and alternative building materials or innovations such as using bacterial species in bio-concrete, the world built from sand may be pulled down by its own weight,” the researchers say.

The researchers included professors Melissa Marschke, Jean-François Rousseau,   Laura Schoenberger from the University of Ottawa and Michael Hoffmann from Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg.

They cite examples from China, Cambodia, India, Nepal, Myanmar and others but not from Africa. The new findings offer a broader perspective about the many small local crises over sand happening all over East Africa and Uganda.

The government of Uganda in 2018 listed sand, granite/stones, and murrum under minerals in a new mining policy that ended years of free-for-all exploitation of the resource but threatens to hand the sand mining business to a select cartel of mainly Chinese miners.

The new policy has been criticised because it sought to allow sand mining on Lake Victoria by well-connected tycoons and Chinese, a development opposed by the environmentalists and officials of the National Environment Management Authority (NEMA).

“You know people always think sand if a free good, but it’s now becoming scarce, it’s a mineral and we are now trying to put it in the definition such that it can be sparingly used,” said  Frank Tumwebaze, who was the minister for Information at the time. He added: “Illegal mining is not only detrimental to the utilisation and exploitation of our minerals, but it is also detrimental to our environment because if people are doing illegal mining, they are causing havoc to the environment”.

Experts says that although under Ugandan laws, sand is now generally considered a mineral resource under the Mining Act, exclusive clauses such as when it is used as a domestic building mineral render its status unclear.

The Lwera, an expansive wetland in the Masaka area on the edges of Lake Victoria has become the ugliest symbol of corrupt exploitation of sand in Uganda.

NEMA says over 80% of sand mining companies in the Lake Victoria Basin are in Lwera swamp. It notes that the sand mining does not benefit the locals. Instead, the sand miners use heavy machinery, leaving huge open pits and trenches leading to flooding of previously safe lake shore settlements and businesses.

In neighbouring Kenya, mining of sand from its section of Indian Ocean floor has been cited as a growing problem. A major fight over sand and the environment in Kenya erupted in 2016 when a Chinese construction company; the China Road and Bridge Corporation mined sand from the ocean to construct the standard gauge railway and additions to the Mombasa Port terminal. The project was supported by the Japanese International Cooperation Agency.

Violent economies, precarious work

The researchers are also concerned about the working conditions for sand miners which vary starkly. “Sand mining can be dangerous,” they say, “Miners may drown as they harvest sand by hand underwater, and hundreds of sand miners, grassroots activists, journalists, police officers, government officials and others have been killed in clashes over sand.”

A diverse set of players including organised crime are involved in the sand mining industry. Roving bandits hunt for sand deposits to dredge, and operations may be hidden from port authorities using high-tech GPS spoofing devices. Local mafia-like structures — in India and likely in at least 70 countries — control entire sand mines and districts.

We know these sites are characterised by violence, secrecy and a lack of trust, but sand’s shadow economy remains largely unknown. This limits our understanding of the financial flows that fuel sand mining, the barriers to trade regulation and sand governance, and the criminal aspects of sand operations.

In Cambodia and southwest China, highly mechanised sand mines offer little local employment. In Nepal, labour-intensive sand mines may employ hundreds of people. And, in Myanmar, households living along rivers may be involved in informal river sand collection.

Last year, the United Nations Environmental Programme published a report entitled `Sand and sustainability: Finding new solutions for environmental governance of global sand resources’ which showed the massive extent of environmental degradation caused by sand extraction around the world. It showed reduced sediment delivery from rivers to many coastal areas, reduced deposits in river deltas, and accelerated beach erosion. It said there is currently between 40-50 billion tonnes per year of unregulated extraction of sand and gravel, around the world.

“Sand extraction is fast becoming a transboundary issue due to sand extraction bans, international sourcing of sand for land reclamation projects and impacts of uncontrolled sand extraction beyond national borders,” the report said in part.