JERICÓ, Colombia — Argirio Tobón Tamayo tugs down the top branch of a coffee tree covered in waxy green leaves, bending it back to reveal coffee cherries in shades of yellow, green and red — the latter ready to be picked. At less than 1.5 meters (5 feet) tall, Tobón Tamayo is the perfect height to pick the bright coffee berries off even the lowest branches, which he’s been doing here since he was 11. “How are we not going to fight for this?” he asks. His coffee and plantain farm sits atop La Soledad, a mountain above the colorful colonial town of Jericó, in Colombia’s Antioquia department, about a three-hour drive from Medellín, the departmental capital. But for more than a decade, the same mountain, with its rich deposits of copper, silver and gold, has been the target of mining giant AngloGold Ashanti. The Quebradona project aims to extract nearly 1.4 million metric tons of copper over a construction and production period of nearly 30 years, plus 2.6 million ounces of gold and 28.1 million ounces of silver via two tunnels up to 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) deep. They’d run beneath three rural mountain neighborhoods in Jericó, where people traditionally grow coffee, plantain and newer crops like avocado. Picking ripe coffee cherries from the trees on his farmland on the outskirts of Jericó, Colombia, Argirio Tobón Tamayo, 58, explains that he’s relied on the crop for his livelihood since he was a boy. He worries that the Quebradona copper…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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