Resumo

URIBE-SIERRA, Sergio Elías; TOSCANA-APARICIO, Alejandra  e  MORA-ROJAS, Alejandro Israel. Mining extractivism in Chile: private concentration of wealth and socioenvironmental conflicts. Invest. Geog [online]. 2023, n.112, e60788.  Epub 22-Abr-2024. ISSN 2448-7279.  https://doi.org/10.14350/rig.60788.

The study of extractivism is relevant in Latin America; there is a broad debate on the social and environmental processes it produces in the territories. Latin American governments highlight the high levels registered by the macroeconomic indicators of the activity; at the same time, academic studies argue that mining promotes economic development and contributes to poverty reduction in the areas where it is implemented. However, this paper argues that mining extractivism leads to the private concentration of wealth and the proliferation of socioenvironmental conflicts. A case study of Chile is proposed as a country specialized in copper extractivism. From 1995 to 2020 the value of copper exports grew 466%. However, what appears to be an economic success is overshadowed by the enormous number of socio-environmental conflicts associated with mining: Chile is the country with the second highest number of conflicts in Latin America.

There is still little research on the distribution of wealth and the territorial pressures on extraction sites. While there are studies on the distribution of mining rents in Latin America (Zerene et al., 2018; Leiva, 2020; Jorrat, 2021), most are based on perspectives from economic theory focused on improving the forms of rent distribution, while the environmental dimension and factors influencing the political economy of extractivism have received less attention.

The aim of the text is to study mining extractivism in Chile between 2001 and 2020 from a socio-environmental framework, in order to analyze the way in which mining promotes private concentration of wealth and the generation of socio-environmental conflicts.

The political economy of natural resources and ecological economics are the theoretical underpinning of the study.

Through a review of specialized literature and an analysis of variables with descriptive statistics, the relationship between extractivism, private concentration of wealth and socio-environmental conflicts was analyzed. The variables analyzed make it possible to identify and evaluate the copper trade surplus or deficit, the annual evolution of the total foreign currency generated by copper exports, the economic relevance of the value of copper exports in total exports and its annual evolution, the annual evolution of the contribution of copper to the national GDP, the annual evolution of tax revenues generated by copper extraction, the distribution of copper extraction between private and state mining, the variation in the standard of living of the communities where the main copper mining projects are located, the annual evolution of the material surplus or deficit of the copper trade, the annual evolution of the territorial pressures generated by mineral extraction through waste rock, and the number and characteristics of mining conflicts in Chile.

The study showed that the intensive extraction of minerals for export with minimal processing, characterized as mining extractivism, privileges the benefits for private companies operating transnationally to the economic and environmental detriment of the extraction sites, which absorb the ecological devastation; the distribution of wealth, considering taxes, is 87% for the private sector and 13% for the state sector. Despite the surplus of income from copper exports, the contributions of this sector to the economy are detrimental. This surplus contrasts with the copper material deficit and the depletion of other natural resources necessary for life. The mining model implemented in Chile is not sustainable; it does not guarantee the economic and environmental wellbeing of the present and future generations. The areas where the main mining projects are located show high levels of multidimensional poverty in comparison with the large profits created by mining. Furthermore, 53% of the municipalities where mining projects are located have higher percentages of population living in income poverty than the national average and, despite the fact that most of the projects have been operating for 20 years in some municipalities, there is no correspondence between the profits generated and the standards of living at the local level; at the same time, the amount of waste rock involved in copper mining and environmental disturbance are very high. The regions that concentrate the largest tonnage of waste rock are also the ones that present the greatest amount of socioenvironmental conflicts. These problems are not exclusive to Chile; they are reproduced in most Latin American countries that have historically participated in the world economy as suppliers of raw materials through unequal economic and ecological exchange schemes.

Palavras-chave : mining; copper; pollution; poverty; uneven development.

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