A company that helped destroy farmland and threaten protesters in Liberia is now trying to mine the coast of eastern Sri Lanka, and it has not bothered to change its strategy, only its name. That is the fact at the center of the Thirukkovil mineral sands dispute, and it deserves more attention than the polite framing of “stakeholder consultation” and “community engagement” usually allows. Capital Metals PLC, backed by UK investors and now working alongside local firms including Damsila, was once Equatorial Palm Oil. Under that name, it was directly implicated in a 2013 land-grabbing scandal in Liberia involving forced seizure of villagers’ ancestral land, deforestation, and intimidation of protesters, documented by Global Witness, before the venture collapsed under public pressure and financial failure. The company didn’t learn a lesson from that collapse. It rebranded, pivoted from palm oil to mineral sands, and went looking for a new coastline. It found Ampara District.
The people of Thirukkovil are not naive about what’s being proposed. Divisional Council chairman S. Sasikumar says the company already tried this once before, in 2021, and was rejected outright. “Our people know exactly what happened to the Pulmoddai area,” he said, pointing to fears that large-scale extraction would permanently destroy the region’s landscape and water table. He’s adamant that no council approval has been granted and that final environmental clearance still hasn’t been issued, no matter what the company claims publicly. He also makes a point that should embarrass anyone defending this project: the people speaking in favor of it are, by his account, largely not the people who actually live there. “If the people who live here don’t want it, how can a project like this move forward?” That’s not rhetorical. It’s the entire question.
Local council member Prabhakaran Yogarasa lays out exactly what’s at stake geographically: three waterways, the Chinna Muhattuvaram, the Periya Muhattuvaram, and the Korale lagoon, all converge at this stretch of coast, feeding an estuary that around 3,000 fishing families depend on directly. This isn’t an empty beach being weighed against a balance sheet. It’s a lagoon system, a mangrove habitat, and the literal economic base of thousands of households, all of it set against extraction projects that have a documented habit of leaving ruined land behind once the resource is gone. Yogarasa’s counter-vision, eco-tourism, lagoon tours, birdwatching, leveraging Pottuvil’s existing tourist traffic, isn’t a fantasy. It’s a real alternative that nobody promoting the mining project seems interested in seriously costing out.
Fishermen’s association chairman Parasuraman Madhan describes a company that has been working this community for years, not with bulldozers but with persistence: representatives reportedly met his association more than fifteen times, requesting signatures from a hundred residents in support of the project, offering boats, nets, roads, and water infrastructure in exchange. “We rejected all of it,” he said. “Our association has held that same position from that day to this.” That’s not a community caving to pressure. It’s a community recognizing a pattern and refusing to play along, which makes it more notable, not less, that Capital Metals has also reportedly tried to repurpose a locally approved pawning-center building for other use, prompting the Divisional Council to post a notice declaring it unlawful. When a company is already cutting corners on a small office building, what confidence should anyone have in its handling of an actual mining operation?
The most damning testimony, though, comes from a 66-year-old fisherman named Parasuraman, who lives near the Korakalappu estuary and remembers a 1997 visit to shrimp farming operations near Chilaw, organized through an NGO. What stuck with him wasn’t the aquaculture techniques. It was that local people there had no drinking water left, years of industrial activity having contaminated the groundwater so badly that water had to be trucked in from distant provinces. “What we learned is that short-term profit can create long-term problems,” he said. “We still have clean groundwater in our villages today. We are not willing to risk that.” That is not an abstract environmental talking point. It is a man describing a cautionary tale he watched happen to someone else’s village, and using it, reasonably, to refuse the same outcome for his own.
The contradictions in how this is being handled at the national level are not subtle. While environmentalists ran a public teach-out at Galle Face Green on the 17th specifically to warn people about destructive mineral sand extraction, a Mineral Sands Technical Conference was happening at the Galadari Hotel at the same time, sponsored by Capital Metals and other extraction firms, with Industry Minister Sunil Handunnetti as chief guest. One government, simultaneously hosting a citizen warning event and an industry-sponsored conference for the company those citizens are protesting, is not balance. It’s a government that hasn’t decided which side it’s actually on, or has decided and is hoping nobody notices the optics. In Parliament, MPs Shanakiyan Rasamanickam and Kaveendiran Kodeeswaran have both raised the same uncomfortable question: who actually benefits from these mineral resources, and is that benefit remotely proportional to the environmental cost borne by people who will never see the export revenue?
None of this means Sri Lanka should ignore mineral sand deposits that could plausibly generate real export income and serious foreign investment. That’s a legitimate national interest and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. But “this resource has value” is not an argument for handing it to a specific company with a documented record of land seizure and environmental destruction somewhere else in the world, especially when the affected community has rejected the project twice, has organized testimony from people who’ve seen exactly this story play out before, and has a viable alternative economic model on the table that nobody in government has bothered to evaluate seriously. The real failure here isn’t that Sri Lanka is weighing development against environment. It’s that the decision is being made in Colombo by people who will not live with the consequences, about land that belongs, in every practical sense, to people in Thirukkovil who will.
