Alligator Pond, Manchester – Bruce Golding says a Government led by him will rededicate billions of dollars earned from the bauxite levy to restore mined out communities and will renegotiate with bauxite companies the manner in which land is treated during and after mining.

The opposition leader, who was addressing a large crowd of Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) supporters who blocked the Alligator Pond square on Thursday night, condemned what he described as the “uglification” of the rural landscape and what he appeared to suggest was the undermining of rural communities as a result of bauxite mining.

Golding said he was horrified at the effect of bauxite mining when he drove through the district of Harmons during a tour of South Manchester Thursday, that climaxed with the mass meeting in Alligator Pond.

“When I came through Harmons today, and I see what the bauxite companies do with massa God earth, it is a disgrace,” Golding told cheering supporters who, according to JLP constituency leaders in South Manchester, had received only two days’ notice of the tour and mass meeting.

Noting that Jamaica’s earnings from the levy on bauxite companies first negotiated by the Michael Manley-led People’s National Party (PNP) Government of the 1970s was between three and four billion Jamaican dollars, Golding said his government would change the situation where the government was free to do “as it likes” with money from the levy which is accumulated in the Capital Development Fund.

“I give a commitment, I am going to dedicate that Capital Development Fund, that bauxite levy, entirely to community development, community facilities in those areas where the bauxite is mined out of,” said Golding.

“If you going with you bulldozer to take out the bauxite and when you take out the bauxite, the place look as if is an atomic bomb that went off there, I am going to dedicate that bauxite levy to go back into those communities to help to put them back together, to help to rehabilitate them, so that they don’t represent the kind of ‘uglification’ of our landscape that I saw as I travelled through Manchester today.,” he said.

Jamaica’s bauxite/alumina industry is a major foreign exchange earner ranked only behind tourism and remittances from Jamaicans abroad. The Economic and Social Survey placed foreign exchange inflows from the bauxite and alumina industry in 2005 at US$378.7 million.

Golding was at pains to point out that “we (the JLP) support the bauxite industry because it is important to the economy”.

But, said he, “whenever I become prime minister of this country, I going call in the bauxite companies and I am going to say to them ‘look, engineering is such an advanced science that you can take out the bauxite without nasty up the countryside the way in which you are doing, and we not going to allow it.

So that whenever yuh planning yuh mining operations, whenever you decide that in this block here there is a million tonnes of bauxite that you want to take out, you going to be required to satisfy the government that you have designed an appropriate (corrective measure) that when you take out the bauxite you fix back the people dem land, fix back the communities’ land space’. And it can be done.”

A Jamaica Bauxite Institute (JBI) source confirmed Friday that bauxite companies were required to adhere to “specific” standards and regulations governing the restoration of land once mining takes place. But Golding, who told his supporters he would be speaking more extensively on the matter at another time, clearly felt that based on the current situation in mined-out bauxite areas, far from enough was being done.

“We must mek sure that when you drive through the place it don’t look like one of Saddam Hussein bomb get way and drop down there,” said he. “It’s not right. And the bauxite companies must prepare themselves to co-operate, because we want to co-operate with them, we want to sit down with them and say ‘look, we want to see exactly how you going to engineer after you extract. How you engineer the restitution of the land, because long after you gone with the bauxite, ordinary Jamaican people, their children, grandchildren and great grandchildren will be here.

The Jamaican people have to live with what you have left after you have taken out the bauxite, and a better way has to be found to restore the land,” the opposition leader added.

Golding made no mention of the issue, but his comments came against the backdrop of ongoing controversy about reported moves by the bauxite companies to begin mining in the Cockpit Country, a remote forested area of several thousand acres embracing sections of southern Trelawny, northern St Elizabeth and eastern St James.

Environmentalists say mining in the cockpits could cause irreparable damage to rare and priceless ecosystems, condemn endangered species to extinction and threaten water supply systems in western, northern and southern Jamaica.

The cockpit controversy apart, there is ongoing concern in a number of rural communities about the effects of bauxite mining and alumina production on the environment, agriculture and public health.