Contamination
Any change of ownership of QMM would create enormous challenges for accountability around the mine’s unresolved social, environmental and human rights issues. Rio Tinto’s past weighs heavily on Madagascar’s present.
Rio Tinto abandoned its Panguna copper mine in Bougainville in 1989 after being accused of triggering civil war and leaving behind catastrophic contamination.
Rio Tinto did finally agree to an independent human rights review of Panguna’s impacts in 2023, but only after 35 years of suffering and an OECD complaint. The investigation confirmed local peoples’ concerns about water contamination and mine tailings risk to life, but remediation of Panguna remains elusive.
In Madagascar, Rio Tinto’s QMM mine has experienced significant levels of conflict due to negative social and environmental impacts. These have taken place every two to three years since it began operations.
There were five major protests between 2021 and 2023 alone. These focused largely on water contamination and lost livelihoods after two tailings dam failures in 2022.
Investors
Months of conflict in Anosy have been attributed to a perceived lack of explanation for the dead fish appearing after QMM released a million cubic metres of toxic mine basin water, together with inadequate support for those affected. This culminated in the deaths of three protestors in 2023, for which no one has been held accountable. Campaigners have described them as extrajudicial killings.
Locals also reported human rights abuses, including gag orders, a history of “pacification” and criminalisation of protest. This has run concurrently with QMM’s failed compensation and grievance processes.
Concerns increased over QMM’s impact on water quality only after its operations breached an environmental buffer zone – so its excavation could reach the richest, cheapest-to-access deposits – and make the project viable.
The breach raised questions whether QMM mine tailings, placed permanently on the bed of a local lake, could be leaching uranium and other toxic heavy metals.
Since 2020, Malagasy civil society, and some international organisations and investors, have repeatedly urged Rio Tinto to conduct an independent assessment of QMM, similar to the Panguna review. Last year, 27 local, national and international organisations signed a letter demanding such an assessment.
Poverty
Rio Tinto has so far refused these demands, resolutely denying any negative impact from QMM. It insists its studies are independent and transparent while ducking public challenges to the veracity of their conclusions.
Critically, the company has failed to share two vital external studies that it promised to civil society members and investors at its AGMs from 2022 to 2024. One report by WRG was about the fish deaths that followed the 2022 dam failures. The second is a related study by WSP of the broader aquatic environment, promised for 2025.
There is no sign of the latter, and requests to the company for these and other technical information related to toxic waste management from QMM’s new water treatment plant remain unanswered. The ghostly silence is not comforting, especially in light of current uncertainties.
The lack of resolution around QMM issues led members of civil society in Anosy to publish a document last year highlighting multiple gaps between QMM rhetoric and reality, and asking for immediate actions.
The document highlights that 92 per cent of the Antanosy population are now reported to be living in poverty, one of the highest levels on the island and a brutal contradiction of World Bank and Rio Tinto’s promises that mining would lift the region out of such hardship.
Uranium
It supports the findings of a 2022 study (PWYP Madagascar), which revealed that more than 90 per cent of respondents felt the mine had brought negative impacts to their lives, including degradation of water quality, loss of livelihoods, new health challenges, and food insecurity due to depleted land and forest access.
The benefits of the mining operations, including QMM’s ambitious biodiversity offsetting programme, have been distributed unequally, which has created haves and have nots and undermining the principle of Sustainable Development Goals – to leave no one behind.
In July 2025, Antanosy dignitaries presented a list of 24 unresolved matters to QMM, questioning how social peace can prevail when critical issues remain unaddressed. Citizens’ safety to voice such questions has improved following political change in Madagascar. The questions could potentially feed into a new parliamentary inquiry into major mining projects on the island.
Justice is also being sought in the UK, as some 6,000 Antanosy citizens pursue a lawsuit against Rio Tinto with human rights firm Leigh Day. These citizens allege that high levels of lead found in the blood of local people through medical testing is a result of QMM polluting downstream waterways, where local people fish and gather drinking water.
Independent experts who reviewed QMM’s water and other data between 2019-2024 have repeatedly flagged the presence of elevated levels of uranium and lead, up to 50 and 40 times higher than World Health Organization drinking-water guidelines.
Unresolved
Rio Tinto states that it “disagrees” with these findings, offering alternative interpretations. When doing so, the company repeatedly fails to include its own baseline water data.
For example, when 2001 baseline water data is correctly applied, expert analysis demonstrates that upstream to downstream of the mine there is an increase in uranium concentration at a factor of 884 when comparing before and after the mining began.
The findings reinforce what many local people reported in surveys in 2020 and 2022. Namely, they perceive QMM is responsible for degraded water quality and the presence of new illnesses.
Rio Tinto positions itself as a leader in supplying “clean minerals” for the energy transition, operating a “green” and “sustainable” mine in Madagascar. The unresolved issues at QMM undermine such claims.
Extraction
The company has removed thousands of hectares of indigenous littoral forest, displaced hundreds of households, and altered the lives and livelihoods of rural communities living in Anosy. The obligations and promises Rio Tinto made to local people in order to extract cannot simply be abandoned.
If Rio Tinto leaves Madagascar without fully addressing QMM’s social and environmental impacts, it will leave a toxic legacy. Just as it did in Bougainville.
As with Panguna, the problems will not disappear. They will follow the company into the future. Into every shareholder meeting, ESG assessment and public claim of ‘responsible mining’.
If Rio Tinto is sincere about “finding better ways” to extract minerals, the first test is clear: take responsibility for the mines it already operates, and for the communities who pay the price of extraction and who endure its damages.
This Author
Yvonne Orengo is an independent researcher, writer and campaigner. She is the former director of the Andrew Lees Trust (UK). She has lived and worked in the Anosy region and has a thirty-year relationship with the south of Madagascar. She has been in collaboration with The Ecologist since 2014 to raise awareness and advocate for human rights around the Rio Tinto/QMM mine. Read more of the coverage of Rio Tinto from The Ecologist here.