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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."
This basically means we're staying in Afghanistan indefinitely. Even worse, in the end the only ones who will benefit are the corporations. The taxpayers and the government will never see any of that money.
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.
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)
America will do what it does best, bring democracy and freedom to the world. Those American corps better get their bids sorted, the Chinese are good at undercutting everyone.
Are you guys seriously thinking the US will get ANY of it? The Afghan gov't stopped caring about the US the day we announced we were leaving. The Afghan gov't has already been cutting it's deals with the Taliban. The US is exactly on the other side of the planet. Hell, we don't even have a friendly neighboring country to get the ore through. What do you think we'll do? FLY it to the US? The Chinese have this locked tight. If we tried to set up any sort of operation, Al-Queda would kill our people, if the Talibani didn't get to them first. The whole point under discussion is us taking the value away from the Afghanis. Can't happen. For anyone else, it's a cheap operation with cheap labor. For us it would be a military operation with expensive contractors getting killed every day. Cannot happen. The Chinese have this one in the bag.
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
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.
Afghanistan isn't really a proper country. Its a load of seperate tribal areas with a border drawn around then that really represents where the surrounding countries end rather than where afghanistan starts. Is effectively ungovernable and has been throughout recorded history. The tribes come together against any outside aggressors but as soon as they're gone they turn in on themselves and the inter tribal conflicts start again. I don't expect this to change anytime soon.
[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.
As a german, that comment makes me puke. Of course not everything done to us by the US after the war was out of pure altruism, but hey, we just happend to lay waste to a huge part of the developed world. Allowing germany to continue to exist should be considered *nice* in that situation. And helping us to develop into a fairly wealthy country was fucking awesome. (Oh, and rose-colored "ostalgie" glasses aside, whatever politically fuelled the US did to us was topped tenfold by what the russians did to east germany.)
I do not approve of everything the US does today, but saying their behavior after WWII was "the opposite of benefiting the greater good" is so far from beeing reasonable I might have to consider I just have been trolled.