Abstract
THE damage done to agricultural land by various forms of mining is considered by Sir Lewis L. Fermor in his exhaustive “Report upon the Mining Industry of Malaya” (Kuala Lumpor: Gov. Press, 1939. 6s.). The destruction of land by the stacking of waste rock and ganguo is small because the provalent forms of tin-mining result in floods of water, heavily charged with silt, either as coarse as sand or as fine as mud. This silt, carried by the effluent water, chokes streams and causes flooding to such an extent that silt-retention schemes, necessitating dams or weirs, are obligatory. But much damage has been done in the past, and some is still being done, especially in the mining process of destroying hillside by water under hydraulic pressure. Again, the removal of the top layers of soil and their mixing with lower layors, which is unavoidable in the process known as dredging, render the whole surface within a mining concession unfertile by the time the land is returned to agricultural use. Against these objections to mining must be placed the fertilizing value on flooded land of a thin deposit of silt. The writer is insistent that rubber cultivation is equally harmful, in fact more so, in ruining land by encouraging soil erosion and leading to the removal of fertile surface layers. Clean weeding, a fetish of the rubber planter, causes soil removal between the rows of trees, and can be prevented only by the wise use of cover crops. Sir Lewis estimates that rubber cultivation has caused the addition of 33,000,000 tons of silt to the river systems since 1905, while tin-mining has contributed only 16,000,000 tons. The debris from the rubber lands is both coarse and fine, and does more harm than the fine silt from the mines, some of which is carried to sea, and some of which fertilizes the land.
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Soil Destruction in Malaya. Nature 144, 901 (1939). https://doi.org/10.1038/144901a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/144901a0