Indonesia: Child Labor in Small-Scale Gold Mining

On the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, thousands of miners hack apart mountains in the Poboya Paneki Grand Forest Park and use mercury to process the ore. In the Hampalit area of central Borneo, an army of miners clear-cuts the swampy rain forest and dredges up the soil in the hunt for gold, poisoning the environment and themselves with mercury and leaving thousands of acres of wasteland. The two neighboring Southeast Asian nations, made up of some 25,000 islands, officially ban child labor, the burning of mercury and most small-scale gold mining. But in both countries, pervasive corruption, payoffs to local officials and weak central governments make it difficult to curb these practices, especially in remote areas. “That’s the problem in developing countries,” said Halimah Syafrul, assistant deputy for hazardous substance management in Indonesia’s Ministry of Environment. “Our government can be bribed. Money can talk.”
http://pulitzercenter.org/reporting/asia-indonesia-labor-gold-mining-child-labor?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+UntoldStories+%28Untold+Stories%29