She says she has been attacked twice for her efforts to stop the diggers.Įxcerpts from Bring me a nightmare: Sand-Mining, Economist, Jan. “Everybody has their finger in the pie,” says Sumaira Abdulali of Awaaz Foundation, a charity in Mumbai. Ministers in several state governments in India have been accused of abetting or protecting illegal sand-mining. It is preferable, of course, to co-opt officials. In Shanghai miners on the Yangzi evade the authorities by hacking transponders, which broadcast the positions of ships, and cloning their co-ordinates. Only about two-fifths of the sand extracted worldwide every year is thought to be traded legally, according to the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime. Locals have already reported seeing dead fish floating on the water.Ĭurbing sand-mining is difficult because so much of it is unregulated. The last time that happened, in 2016, 1,600 square kilometres of land were ruined, resulting in losses of $237m. Vietnam’s agriculture ministry has warned that seawater may travel as far as 110km up the Mekong this winter. As sea levels rise with climate change, saltwater is surging up rivers in Australia, Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Vietnam, among other places, and crop yields are falling in the areas affected. Moreover, according to WWF, a conservation group, as much as 90% of the sediment that once flowed through the Mekong, Yangzi and Ganges rivers is trapped behind dams or purloined by miners, thereby robbing their deltas both of the nutrients that make them fecund and of the replenishment that counters coastal erosion. It is thought to have contributed to the extinction of the Yangzi river dolphin. Removing sand from riverbeds deprives fish of places to live, feed and spawn. Vietnam expects to run out of sand this year.Īll this has an environmental cost. In Indonesia some two dozen small islands have vanished since 2005. But according to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Asians are scooping up sand faster than it can naturally replenish itself. Extraction from coastlines and rivers is therefore surging. Sand shaped by water is coarser and so binds better. The United Arab Emirates is carpeted in dunes, but imports sand nonetheless because the kind buffeted by desert winds is too fine to be made into cement. In reality it is a scarce commodity, for which builders are now scrabbling. In the popular imagination, sand is synonymous with limitlessness. In Vietnam in 2017 it quadrupled in just one year. Little wonder then that the price of sand is rocketing. The OECD thinks the construction industry’s demand for sand and gravel will double over the next 40 years. Since the 1960s Singapore-the world’s largest importer of sand-has expanded its territory by almost a quarter, mainly by dumping it into the sea. China got through more cement between 20 than America did in the entire 20th century (the use of cement is highly correlated with that of sand). Demand is greatest in Asia, where cities are growing fast (sand is the biggest ingredient in concrete, asphalt and glass). No other natural resource is extracted and traded on such an epic scale, bar water. The world uses nearly 50bn tonnes of sand and gravel a year-almost twice as much as a decade ago.