Suriname

By John Terrett in Americas on December 24th, 2010
Photo by Al Jazeera

As the price of gold continues to soar on international exchanges, one country in particular is benefitting from the spike.
The tiny South American country of Suriname has gold aplenty and is experiencing somewhat of an economic boom from gold mining - both legal and illegal.

The trouble is the illegal side of the industry is unregulated and therefore very dangerous for the miners who do it.

To find out more I went to Brokopondo where I watched as a truck laden with gold-riddled ore headed towards a production plant run by a Canadian mining company deep in the rain forest.

In this area IAMGOLD is the only company legally allowed to mine.

But in the middle of the land allotted to them ILLEGAL miners also extract the metal and there's precious little IAMGOLD can do about it!



The company's general manager Paul Korpi reck

By Gabriel Elizondo in Americas on December 27th, 2009
Photo by Reuters

Gangs of men running through the streets with machetes with the intent to kill people of a different ethnicity, raping women, and torching buildings and cars.

By Gabriel Elizondo in Americas on November 28th, 2009
Photo by AFP
It was billed as a summit of presidents of Amazon countries. But most of the presidents didn’t bother to show up, making the ‘summit of presidents’ in Manaus one with few actual presidents in attendance.
 
About half of the mysterious place called "the Amazon" is in Brazil. The other half is divided between 8 other countries - Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana.
 
So Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Brazil's president, organised Thursday's one-day summit of Amazon countries as a chance for them to come together a forge a common agenda ahead of the all important Copenhagen climate change summit starting on December 7 - which is being billed as the biggest climate change meeting in generations.

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