At least 32 people have died in a landslip at a jade mine in northern Myanmar, a local fire services spokesman told CNN on Wednesday.
According to Sa Tay Za of the Hpakant Fire Service Department, the landslip occurred on Sunday in the isolated and mountainous village of Hpakant in the northern state of Kachin.
Za added that all but one of the bodies discovered were those of men, and they had all been given back to their families.
According to Myanmar’s state-run publication Global New Light, the collapse of a sand cliff had trapped the miners by allowing water to flood into a nearby lake.
About 70% of the world’s jade is produced in Myanmar, and Hpakant is home to some of the biggest and most profitable jade mines in the world, worth billions of dollars.
According to the non-profit watchdog group Global Witness, the business is riddled with conflict, corruption, exploitation, and environmentally harmful practises and is mostly driven by demand from neighbouring China.
According to the group, the jade sector in Myanmar was valued roughly $31 billion in 2014, or close to half of the nation’s reported GDP for that year.
However, because it is mostly unregulated, the industry’s real value is unknown. An advocacy group called the Natural Resource Governance Institute named Myanmar’s diamond industry as one of the most opaque in the world.
Miners, who are frequently poor immigrants from other regions of the country, are constantly in danger of dying or being hurt by landslides.
In 2020, a jade mine in Hpakant experienced a landslip that resulted in the deaths of more than 160 individuals. The same region experienced a similar and fatal disaster in 2021.