"African Civil Society Says No to Mining – Yes to Life!"

We, a network of like-minded organisations and communities...are deeply concerned about the runaway scale and intensity of mining we are now witnessing, and the impact it is already having on the lives of the communities we work with. Small farmers still produce 72% of the world’s food, despite all the pressures they are under from unsustainable “development” practices...Our experience has shown that:

• Communities do not benefit from mining. Mining enriches a few for a short time but impoverishes many by taking away land and other productive resources which would have been used for food production, now and into the future. It undermines livelihoods that communities have sustained for generations.
• Mining threatens our water, our territories and our wild places. Where there is no water there is no life. When we lose our ecosystems we lose the wealth of diversity that we depend on to build resilience to climate change. Climate change will hit Africa worse than any other continent.
• Mining does not create the type of jobs that contribute to our well being or improve our way of life. Instead it destroys sustainable, meaningful and diversified livelihoods, which local communities control, rather than depending on speculating interests, short term jobs and terrible working conditions.
• There is no such thing as sustainable mining. Mining means destruction and toxification of the land and water systems.

We are calling for...[t]he recognition that no mining can take place in any sacred natural sites and territories or in any protected areas...