Our perspective is that this agreement has strengthened the current legislative framework for Canadian investors in Colombia, particularly speaking about the mining sector, and that civil society in Colombia, together with organizations here in Canada, are identifying serious risks to indigenous and Afro-Colombian lands and to vital sources of water.
The way in which mining concessions have been granted quite carelessly across much of Colombian territory means that there is dangerous overlap with vital sources of water, with ancestral lands of Afro-Colombian and indigenous peoples, and entire communities that currently make their living from activities such as small-scale mining.
One of the cases explored within the Colombian report, which you may have read already, would involve the entire displacement of a community that has relied, for some 400 years, on small-scale mining investments in order to make way for a Canadian company that would, in a period of 20 years, basically exploit all of the gold reserves in this area and then presumably walk away, putting effectively thousands of people out of work and displacing an indigenous community as well that's not been fairly consulted on that project, and potentially having serious impacts on sources of water that flow into the Cauca River, which is one of the main water supplies in the country. That's just one example.