With mining company Anglo American’s successful sale of a contentious $5.4 billion stake in Las Bronces copper mine in Chile, they may have won the point but lost the game, as relations with the Chilean government and wider public have sharply soured during the dispute. During the transaction in question, the state-owned copper interest Codelco [...]
There are some interesting video reports posted to Americas Quarterly discussing the mining industry in Peru, with a special focus on China.
One doesn’t often associate the term “corporate social responsibility” with Chinese state-owned businesses, but it would be a mistake to assume that an unguided or less regulated set of standard operating procedures would necessarily produce a competitive advantage. In a number of African nations, local communities are beginning to experience a backlash against their new [...]
To describe the recent discovery of natural gas deposits off the Southern coast of Mozambique as “transformational” might be an understatement. Until recently, this East African country of about 23 million people had a paltry annual GDP per capita of $1,000 with 70% of the population living below the poverty line. Now, with the announcement [...]
Some important information from Mining Weekly on the uptick in acquisitions being made by China in shareholdings of foreign mining firms, including a special interest in precious metals: Strategic Capital & Intelligence Group (SCIG) CEO Jack Slibar expected the pace of Chinese investment into foreign mining firms to pick up significantly over the next two [...]
It’s become a familiar exercise in many Sub-Saharan resource states – a popular leader comes to power by coup, revolution, and sometimes, by vote, promises sweeping social change and the eradication of poverty by tapping a greater share of the resource wealth, revokes and reissues a variety of licenses and rights, hangs onto power for [...]
Foreign policy used to be a craft practised by diplomats and statesmen. No longer.
Zimbabwe again hinted it might show flexibility in its stance towards foreign mining companies, with a government official saying a law forcing them to surrender 51 percent stakes to local people was “an aspiration“, not a hard target. Reuters reports the rather groundbreaking remarks took place at a mining conference today by Prince Mupazviriho, the [...]
We as an international community have a duty in newfound opportunity: we must pay close attention to the booms in present-day Zimbabwe in order for them to respectively blossom in to sustainable pillars of development. We must also accept and address certain realities hindering our ‘getting on-board’. The Zimbabwean mining sector is expected to grow [...]
The South African mining sector could be in for a seismic shift. Executive leadership of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa has issued a call for mines nationalised and cooperatives established as a way of dealing with poverty After a meeting of its national executive committee (NEC) last Sunday, Numsa said that nationalising [...]
