Serbian farmers vow to oppose Rio Tinto lithium project even after EU labels it strategic
GORNJE NEDELJICE, Serbia, June 5 (Reuters) - Zlatko Kokanovic, a farmer from Serbia's Jadar region, is determined to stop development of a Rio Tinto (RIO.L), opens new tab lithium project, identified this week as strategic by the European Commission as it aims to cut dependency on China for mineral resources.
Lithium is a key component in batteries for electric vehicles and mobile devices. The mine in the Jadar valley would eventually meet 90% of Europe's lithium needs should it go ahead.
But like thousands of protesters, including many other farmers, who have sought to block development of the project in recent years, Kokanovic is worried about pollution of farmland in a region where a majority of people live off agriculture.
"There are some things the money cannot buy," Kokanovic, a father of five children who is one of the largest milk producers in Gornje Nedeljice and a leading activist in the region, told Reuters.
"I want to tell them (Rio Tinto) not to try to develop the mine or there will be unrest," he added.
Rio Tinto has not given a start date for the project, which is expected to produce 58,000 metric tons of lithium carbonate annually, but has pledged to develop the mine cleanly.
"The project will be delivered to the highest levels of transparency, to the highest levels of environmental protection and human rights standards," said Chad Blewitt, Rio Tinto's managing director for the Jadar project.
"The European Union and European Commission never substitute, they never sacrifice those high standards."
Blewitt had told Reuters on Wednesday that the company is revising the cost of the project.
Rio Tinto's lithium project has been contested by green groups for years and sparked massive street protests in EU-candidate Serbia in 2022.
In 2021 and 2022, Serbian environmentalists collected 30,000 signatures in a petition demanding that parliament enact legislation to halt lithium exploration in the country.
The government revoked all Rio Tinto's exploration licences in 2022, before the Constitutional Court overturned the decision last year and reinstated them.
Government officials say the mine will boost Serbia's economy.
How protesters can stop a project that has domestic and international approval is unclear. But recent student protests in Serbia, where hundreds of thousands have taken to the streets and succeeded in collapsing the government, show the strength of civil society in the Balkan country.
Kokanovic remains determined.
'My message to them is not to even try (to excavate lithium in Jadar), unless they want this government to be toppled fast."
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Booze, wood-burners, Sunday roasts... as the list of everyday pleasures targeted by the SNP grows longer, have we EVER been subjected to a more censorious nanny state government?
They've clobbered smokers. Thought – aloud – about criminalising the ownership of cats. Its Fife panjandrums are now leaning on local chippies to slash portion-sizes – in the averred interests of public health: now, SNP surrogates threaten your Sunday roast. The ink had barely dried on the first Scottish Parliament minutes before that first cohort of MSPs had banned fox-hunting and hare-coursing. Passed a whole Act about dog-fouling. Our underemployed, overwaged legislators are still after anyone gasping for a fag - in the latest wheeze, you can now be prosecuted for puffing within fifteen metres of a hospital boundary, even if you are on the other side of the street. Disposable vapes are in their sights too: for years it has been an offence to vape at any Scottish railway station, even on a platform in the open air. No pleasure seems safe from the Nats, from their fatuous efforts to police football chants – indeed, the initial law was so intrusive, and so unworkable, it had to be abandoned. Forget that soothing drink, by the way. 'Minimum pricing,' whacked up again last year, means you're now shelling out more for a litre of sherry than, back in 1999, you had to hand over for a bottle of Famous Grouse. Our English neighbours enjoy cheaper beer than we do. And now the Nats have a real new beef with us. The Scottish Government's Climate Change Committee, wagging a sententious finger, says we should all be eating 30 per cent less red meat. And that farmers – as if they did not have trials enough, with scant profit-margins and over-weening bureaucracy in one of Scotland's loneliest jobs – should rear a third fewer sheep and cattle. Even that shocker has had to jostle for attention with other ridiculous headlines. NHS Fife, for instance, is leaning on the hot takeaway trade to cut the typical portion of, for instance, fish and chips. And the Scottish Animal Welfare Commission suddenly has anglers in its crosshairs. Fishing practices should be reformed, it drones, as fish are 'sentient beings' with 'emotional experiences that matter to them.' It hopes ministers will soon review the law regarding 'actions that occur in the normal course of fishing.' Such a move, panted one newspaper and as if it had just unmasked Lord Lucan, 'could outlaw many aspects of angling such as hooking a fish and removing it from the water.' SAWC does, admittedly, have form. Only in February, it thought about forbidding cat ownership in parts of the country where there was demonstrable predation on birds and small mammals. It would make still more sense to shoot every last bird of prey out of the sky and, if SAWC wants a rough guide, between 1837 and 1840 gamekeepers in forested Invergarry killed 285 common buzzards, 63 goshawks, 27 white-tailed sea eagles, 15 golden eagles and 18 ospreys. Not to mention six gyrfalcons, eleven hobbies, 275 kites, 371 rough-legged buzzards, 462 kes-trels, 78 merlins, 63 hen harriers and seven orange-legged falcons. The First Minister, of less stern stuff, limply assured the public that the SNP administration had no plans to ban pet cats. Last year, too, the Nationalists were even forced to abandon a crazed scheme to ban wood-burning stoves in new-build houses. It feels increasingly as if you cannot take three strides in what one of John Swinney's predecessors once hailed as 'the best small country in the world' without being lectured, harangued, re-proached and disapproved of. Tobacco, sugar, booze, salmon or that jumbo-sausage supper… ministers have their beady little eyes on us. And, no doubt, others have eyes on them too. It is only fair to point out that this culture of censure, rebuke and righteously rapped knuckles long predates the SNP's 2007 ascent to power. From practically the start, the devolved new Scotland rapidly won much wry comment for eat-your-vegetables nanny statism. After the first MSPs had solemnly voted themselves a com-memorative medal. In 2005, for instance, Nora Radcliffe – Liberal Democrat MSP for Gordon, till Alex Salmond toppled her from obscurity into oblivion – called for a ban on the boiling of live lobsters. The Scottish Executive, as it then was, pelted us with posters and raucous TV ads about the horrors of everything from eating too many crisps, through dodgy electric blankets, to the enormity of consigning your Christmas turkey to the fridge before it was completely cold. And, in April 2006 and to widespread trepidation – many journalists hurried up from England, hoping for riots on the streets – Jack McConnell's administration banned smoking in enclosed public spaces. A policy, in fact, first suggested by a Nationalist MSP, Stewart Maxwell. But Scots submitted to it so meekly that one wonders how much it emboldened another First Minister, fourteen years later, to impose all sorts of ridiculous restrictions on our liberties during Covid. At its height, you could not sit down on a park bench, enjoy coffee with a neighbour in your garden or leave your house more than once a day. It was even decreed an offence to venture beyond the bounds of your own local authority. When I in March 2021 had briefly to scamper back to my Hebridean lair, by deserted roads through silent towns, for an armful of Astra-Zeneca, I was so terrified of being stopped and challenged I carried a sort of letter-of-transit from my GP. Meanwhile, our unfortunate children shuffled down school corridors in sweaty masks as – concerned about classroom ventilation – ministers wondered aloud about sawing the bottoms off doors and Nicola Sturgeon tut-tutted that Prince William dared to visit Scotland. Behind this are two dark realities. The first is that, while finally responsible for a host of public services, the Scottish Government (and, by extension, the Scottish Parliament) delivers virtually none of them. Local authorities school most of our children; local health-boards direct primary care and hospitals, and so on. When it finally did have an immediate and grave responsibility, from the dawn of 2021 – vaccinating the elderly and the vulnerable against coronavirus – the Scottish Government made such a laboured fist of things that, quietly and with the deepest tact, Whitehall sent in the army. The second reality is that there is a very old middle-class tradition in Scotland of censuring working-class pleasures. 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This is presumably pegged to three core tenets of tree-hugging faith: that reduced upland grazing will in scant decades see the regeneration of much Scottish forest; that cattle-feed is a wildly inefficient use of grain; and that cows, naturally flatulent, are responsible for about 14.5 per cent of global greenhouse gases. The precise figure is, in fact, disputed. But the Committee's lordly loftiness flies in the face of basic realities. For one, about 65 per cent of all the land in Britain can bear nothing but grass. Cows and sheep – hold the front page – eat grass. We cannot. Our cloven-hooved stock will, accordingly, be an essential part of our food economy till the end of time, and the beef industry in particular has for years been working hard to reduce its carbon footprint. For another, much of upland and coastal Scotland is too high – or too exposed to salted winds – to bear significant woodland. 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But households remain reluctant to buy and cook venison – and, absurdly, much of the venison for sale in Britain today is imported. In any event, most of us eat less red meat these days, not least because it is so expensive: you will struggle to buy a family-sized pot-roasting cut for less than a tenner. And in the Hebrides, well within living memory, it was a rare treat: fish and potatoes all week, with meat (and the related broth as the first course) on Sundays. There are other environmental realities that seem to have eluded the Climate Change Committee. Without cattle, as the Royal Agricultural Society of England has pointed out, 'there would be no dung, which would vastly reduce the presence of dung beetles in their habitat. 'As well as delivering a myriad of ecosystem benefits, such as sequestering carbon into the soil, dung beetle larvae are a key food source for ground-nesting birds. It is estimated that dung beetles save farmers in the UK £367 million per year…' Then we have that NHS Fife obsession: how big is your fish supper? In fact, fish and chips – cooked properly and well – is a remarkably healthy meal. There is, for instance, no added sugar. It is rich in Omega-3 fatty acids, vitamins B12 and D, and high-quality protein – and less fat than a typical serving of, say, chicken tikka masala or an oil-slicked Chinese takeaway. 'Typically,' assures one authority, 'fish and chips on average have 9.42 grams of fat per 100 grams, while the average pizza has 11, chicken korma 15.5 and a donner kebab a whopping 16.2…' We come to SWAC's vapourings about angling. One rather doubts such solicitude extends to every creature of the earth. Even the Commission's august personages doubtless prefer life without headlice, tapeworms and rats and most, presumably, vaccinate their children. It remains official NatureScot advice to smash dead any American signal crayfish you meet in our fresh waters and, for over two decades, it has been determinedly exterminating feral mink in the Western Isles. Where SWAC may have a point is the dubious practice of 'catch and release.' My own view is that you should only venture out with the rod for fish you can eat and, having caught your salmon and thumped it on the head, you head for home and the deep freeze, rather than hauling in fish after fish, weighing them, measuring them, taking a few snaps for social media and then returning them to the deep. Not forgetting a protracted chat about emotional experiences that really mattered to them. But, in coarse fishing, catch and release is the whole point: we might, perhaps, command barbless hooks, or even the soluble sort decreed in the pursuit of bluefin tuna. The wild Atlantic salmon may not always be with us; the typical Scottish political animal will add to the gaiety of nations for decades to come. Bossy, virtue-signalling, carefully picking its targets, and unconsciously living what Ronald Reagan once mocked as the prevalent tenets in modern statecraft. If it moves, tax it; if it keeps moving, regulate it – and, if it stops moving, subsidise it.
