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$1 Trillion In Minerals Found In Afghanistan
clustro writes "American geologists working with the Pentagon have discovered deposits of iron, copper, cobalt, gold, and lithium of incredible bounty, amounting to nearly $1 trillion. In fact, the lithium deposits are so vast, an internal Pentagon memo has stated that Afghanistan could become the 'Saudi Arabia of lithium.' The wealth of the deposits completely flattens the current GDP of Afghanistan, estimated at about $12 billion. Mining would completely transform the economy of Afghanistan, which presently is propped up by the opium trade and foreign aid. However, it could take decades for extraction to reach its full potential due to the war, the lack of heavy industry in the country, and a corrupt national government."
Don't forget China shares a border with Afghanistan
It's their resource, sure, except they could live on it for another thousand years, memorizing Koran and stoning women, and never even realize it's there. Hopefully it won't be like Saudi oil all over again. We discover it, we find use for it, we develop the technology and build the infrastructure, we extract it, we process it, we ship it, their leaders keep most of the money and use it to build gold palaces while keeping their population imprisoned in worst darkness and ignorance and then use that same oil to blackmail us.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
China was on it since 2008. At least. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article3941656.ece
The Economist had an interesting story about it something like one year ago. I couldn't find it unfortunately.
My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
From the article:
"In 2004, American geologists, sent to Afghanistan as part of a broader reconstruction effort, stumbled across an intriguing series of old charts and data at the library of the Afghan Geological Survey in Kabul that hinted at major mineral deposits in the country. They soon learned that the data had been collected by Soviet mining experts during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, but cast aside when the Soviets withdrew in 1989."
I think today I'm with the conspiracy theorists...
Sadly, no. You must start with a healthy government before mineral riches become a boon to the average citizen, let alone the poor.
http://www.hulu.com/watch/91538/vanguard-rebels-in-the-pipeline
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Saudi Arabia is not poor, and by that I mean the people are not poor. The government spreads the oil money around a fair bit. They import people to be poor, er, I mean to do the work the Saudis don't want to.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
If you think mineral deposits "wipe out poverty" you ought to travel to west Africa.
The vast majority (99%+) of Sierra Loeneans who spend their lives in poverty, toiling to find diamonds, have never seen a finished and cut diamond. Many never even find a single diamond. Sierra Leone ranks amongst the five least developed countries.
A single gold mine in Mali will produce $1.5BN (USD) and has made a 0.07% reinvestment ($100k) in schools from its World Bank loan. The words of one worker, “[w]e read on the Internet that AngloGold has pronounced that Morila is the most profitable gold mine in the world, and yet most workers here get no lodging or training, or even health care. In South Africa, AngloGold is paying for the anti-retrovirals for its staff that are HIV-positive, and here they take all our medical costs out of our salaries.” Mine companies often pay only hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in lease fees.
Rutile is 95% titanium dioxide and Sierra Leone’s deposits of rutile may account for as much as 30% of the world’s supply, and the U.S. government lists it as a “strategic metal” to be stockpiled by the U.S. defense department. Sierra Leone is pock-marked by destroyed farmland and displaced communities, all in the name of rutile and diamond minining.
Another poster made an allusion to the mid-east, but Africa I think is a much better example as oil actually has been good for the average person in some mid-east countries, but these are fairly stable and developed countries. To look at natural resource reserves in unstable and undeveloped countries, versus stable, one only has to look at Oman and Yemen (both oil-rich and neighbors, one has GDP per capita 10x of the other). West Africa is a much better comparison to Afghanistan than Kuwait or the UAE (so if you want to make the mid-east comparison, skip Dubai and look at Yemen).
For a good read (and my source for much of the info above) I would recommend Joan Baxter's Dust from our Eyes.
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
Panama. Bosnia. Also, you could ask any citizen of South Korea whether they'd rather be part of North Korea.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Saudi Arabia has not had its oil resources benefit the citizens. Last time I was there you could see white (whites are normally first class citizens and not immigrants) citizens beg on the streets. In saudi arabia you cant have a successful business because if you have, someone from the royal family will come by and tell you that you have a partner, or that you have a paper to sign. So no one in saudi tries to be successful at business, they just do as to go buy. Now, when I was there I saw people live in tents, no it was not during hajj season, and no it was not in some desert, it was inside a city, they were there for a few days, until the police came and throwed them away. In saudi arabia, citizens are poor, non-citizens are poor, only some privileged families are richer than average, these are the families that have contacts with the royal families. If you dont have contact with the royal family you are not even going to have functioning running water in your house.
My understanding is that US citizens must pay taxes in the USA even if they work abroad
As a US citizen that works abroad, I have to FILE taxes, but pay nothing. I basically declare that I made a certain amount working abroad and was taxed in that country. I declare I made 0 in the US, and I owe 0 US taxes. Apparently making rather large sums of money overseas is different, according to the H&R Block person who helps me file.
Also, bringing over 10K back into the US is taxed.
Note: I live in a 1st world country that the US is quite friendly with. It may be different in Afghanistan.
This is great news because this could help wipe out Afghanistan's poverty, the actual biggest obstacle to a functioning government.
That's exactly what happened everywhere oil or minerals have been discovered around the world. Middle East currently enjoys highest standard of living than the rest of the world thanks to half a century of massive oil extraction. Oh wait...
The United Arab Emirates has a fairly high standard of living because of the discovery of oil there. Before discovering it, they were scraping by on fishing.
... president of the UAE at its inception, ... directed oil revenues into healthcare, education and the national infrastructure."
However, it's not a 1 step process. The 2nd step has a lot to do with it: "The late Sheikh Zayed,
This is great news because this could help wipe out Afghanistan's poverty, the actual biggest obstacle to a functioning government.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
[1] I don't ignore tax/royalty/dividends that may go to the local government in my original post. I partially address this (mine leases in Mali that are in the hundreds-of-thousands-of-dollars per year), but even if the mines are paying "fair" taxes (etc) to the governments, that implies very little about eradicating poverty in a country that is unstable undeveloped. See: Yemen vs Oman. When something like 90% of US foreign aid comes directly back to the United States (source: Baxter's book, which is full of cites, apologies I don't have it available), I am dubious that the taxes paid by natural resource extraction firms will be any more beneficial to the impoverished people of a region.
... as the "subsistence" farmers if their lives are better after the "economic activity" came to their region, and the answer is invariably: NO.
[2] Morila did get a $150M loan, yes (source: Joan Baxter). These types of loans usually call for community investment, that is the point of the World Bank (ostensibly anyway), to develop countries, not to make mine owners richer (although you can make a good argument for the inverse! See documentary: Life and Debt). As to whether they got this loan, I tend to trust Joan Baxter on this matter (she's a BBC correspondent, etc), although I don't have her book handy (I loaned it to a colleague).
[3] Claims of community reinvestment are now standard practice, sure. Note: you are citing mining companies press released. According to BP's web site they are "unaware of any reason" that would have caused their "share price movement." This just happens to be a timely example, but I think it's a good one, in that it's pretty obvious what caused their share price movement (I assume their argument would be that they are still quite profitable despite their current environmental catastrophe — while that may be true, this argument is spin, at best). I am extremely dubious of any claims made by mining interests as to what they are investing in communities. I'd rather believe neutral sources (like BBC reporters) who actually VISIT these areas and report on what they've seen. "Investing" $240,000 might mean they have a $200,000/yr consultant on payroll and he had $40,000 in expenses while "researching" how to help the community.
Quoting your press released, "in areas where there had been little economic activity other than subsistence farming..." Maybe those farmers were happy. Now there is "economic activity" there, but are the farmers more or less impoverished? I'll bet more. We are debating whether minerals in undeveloped countries bring people out of poverty, mind you, not whether mining companies pay taxes.
[4] Ghana is the most stable of western African countries, and thus the least applicable to Afghanistan. Nevertheless, I'm happy to talk about it. I'll be spending three months in Ghana this year doing infectious disease work, so I'm reasonably versed on its issues. As you stated, Ghana might be the best case example. Even so, a third of the country lives on less than a dollar a day, and although that percentage has come down a lot, and they may well meet their MDG for poverty by 2015, it's still not great. More than half the country lives on less than $2/day. 40 years ago South Korea and Ghana had the same per capita income (source: council on foreign relations). Still think mining has brought Ghanaians out of poverty? PPP GDP nowadays for Korea = $27000, Ghana = $1400. No contest as to who is still mired in poverty. I'll admit that I have a biased perspective, when I see children dying because their parents couldn't afford the twenty-six cent cost of a measles inoculation, three dollars for malaria treatment, or ten dollars for a bed net. And I have yet to witness mining or oil extraction doing much to help fix this. Sierra Leone, Nigeria, etc, the story is always the same
[5] To address the last sentence of your post, "But, the assumption that mines are inherently destructive, and that mining co
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
FWIW, the Bush family was wealthy long before they were presidents. Not that this implies that they were not corrupt, but neither does the fact that the younger is not "starving or living in poverty" imply that he was corrupt. Just sayin'
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
If you don't understand finance on a national level there's nothing wrong with that, but please do not make stupid comments. No, China does not own the mortgage on the US. What's more they are not the loan shark who has a debt they can call due whenever they like (which cannot be done with a mortgage by the way, the term of the loan is specified by contract).
What China has done is invest in US securities. They have purchased US Treasure bonds/notes/etc. What those are is IOUs. They basically say "The US government promises to pay you X American dollars on Y date." The specifics vary, some pay interest at defined times, others are ones that pay face value on a given date, and are purchased at a discount. Regardless, they are all IOUs, the government promises to pay you money later. It isn't a debt you can call due, only way to get money early is to sell them, for a discount, to someone else.
What's more you may have noticed that I said they are paid in American dollars. All US securities are paid out in US dollar amounts. Also, with the exception of TIPS, they are specified in a numerical amount. So a note will pay $1000, or will pay 3% interest or the like. That means if the value of the US dollar drops drastically, so does the value of your security. They don't pay you in your own currency, so you can't say "Well our currency is worth 6 times as much now so you owe us 6 times what the note says." They pay in US dollars.
Then there's the fact that a large part of China's currency having value and legitimacy is the reserves of US securities they hold. It is an investment, like any other, and without it, their currency would have problems. May seem silly to you but it is how the world works.
So this is not a case of China holding all the cards. It is more a case of economic mutually assured destruction. For China to attempt to liquidate all their US holdings would be disastrous to them as well. Putting all those bonds on the market would badly depress prices as it shook confidence of investors. China would have to suffer a massive loss to be able to do it, which would hurt their economy likely worse than it hurt the US's.
Also there's a very real possibility they could lose everything. So as I said, the notes are only worth something because they US says they are. Also it isn't as though they are physical notes/bonds anymore, they are just entries in a computer at the Department of Treasury. So, suppose China threatens the US with the liquidation of all bonds if the US doesn't let them in Afghanistan. In response the US confers with their allies and reaches a deal: This amounts to economic warfare and by US and International law, in the cases of war assets of the country can be frozen or nulled. Or all Chinese securities go away. The other countries like this, they also own US securities and they don't want to see the value of these tank. Now, all of a sudden, china has nothing. A massive amount of their net worth has been wiped out. They can't use the notes as leverage because they are void.
So please, enough with the "China owns the US!" crap. No, they don't, neither do any of the other holders of US notes (including the government itself and many US citizens).
A republic is referred to as a "representative democracy" but those are weasel words
No those are orthogonal terms. The USA is both a representative democracy and a republic. The UK is a representative democracy but not a republic. The PRC is a republic but not a representative (or direct) democracy.
A republic is a state where power is not vested in a hereditary monarch. A democracy is a state where the ultimate power is vested in the people. A representative democracy is one where individual decisions are made by representatives of the people, as opposed to a direct democracy (see some ancient Greek city states and modern Switzerland) where decisions are made directly by the people.
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