BertelsmannStiftung
Furture Challenges: A
Zero-Sum Game?
Thursday, 18 October 2012 / Tom Fries Lourdes GomezTags: GLOBALISATION, globalization, indigenous
communities, mining, mining industry, Natural Resources, resources, Rural, urbanization
Rapid globalization makes competition for land, raw materials and other resources intense. When the stakes
are so high, can rural, indigenous peoples and urban, industrialized communities both benefit from resource
extraction? Or is this situation a zero-sum game?
For this content package, Future Challenges decided to look at the tug-of-war between our need for raw
materials to provide us with the objects that constitute “development,” from water pipes to washing machines.
We put together several different perspectives from professionals in this area from the United States, Australia,
Canada, the Philippines and Mongolia – all places where rural and indigenous people are both enjoying the
benefits and suffering the costs of nearby extractive industries. To these five people, we posed the following
question:
“Rapid globalization makes competition for land, raw materials and other resources intense. When the
stakes are so high, can rural, indigenous peoples and urban, industrialized communities both benefit
from resource extraction? Or is this situation a zero-sum game?”
Below you’ll find their own opinions, but we want to know how you see the issue, too.
—–
Tom Hoefer, the Executive Director of the Northwest Territories & Nunavut Chamber of Mines in Canada,
pointed to the benefits that Inuit communities in Canada’s high North have enjoyed, thanks to the mining
companies that provide livelihoods after pressure on their traditional ways of life.
“Training partnerships and industry-community agreements have helped make mining the largest private sector
employer of Aboriginal people, and have created a brand new Aboriginal mining business community. The
mines provide much needed employment and income to fill the void created when NGO pressures decimated
the fur trade, an economic cornerstone of Aboriginal communities for several hundred years. Aboriginal
communities have captured thousands of person years of long term, high paying mining jobs, and several
billion dollars in business spending through their new business ventures.”
(Click here to read the full interview with Tom Hoefer)
—–
Clemente Bautista, President of Kalikasan: People’s Network for the Environment points instead to the oneway street that mining has been in the Philippines, delivering profits into the hands of foreign corporations
while ruining homelands for millions of rural people.
“As of July 2012, mining concessions cover 1.15 million hectares of Philippine soil, mostly owned by foreign
corporations. As these corporations have the right to own and exploit these areas, millions of our grassroots
peoples were driven out of their lands. Large-scale mines have historically caused massive pollution and
widespread forest denudation, affecting the livelihood and food source of rural communities.”
(Click here to read the full statement from Clemente Bautista)
—–
Andy White, Director at the Rights and Resources Initiative, points out that it’s not actually a simple tug-ofwar; governments and civil society organizations are also responsible for establishing, monitoring and
enforcing norms in these situations.
“…in many of these countries, the land rights and the resources rights of the indigenous tribal communities are
not yet formally recognized. They’re not recognized by all governments and actually implemented. So as you
know, in many of these countries most mining now takes places in rural or remote areas. Those are the same
areas where many indigenous and other rural, usually politically-marginal people live and have lived for
millennia. But in many of these countries, the governments still claim that land as government land and the
resources as government-owned resources, even though they’ve signed international conventions that say that
they need to respect the rights of indigenous communities. Many countries have not yet done even that…”
(Click here to read the transcript of the interview that Lourdes Gomez, Future Challenges Regional Editor for
Australia-Pacific, conducted with Andy White)
—–
Amartuvshin Amarjargal, Associate Professor at the University of Ulaanbataar in Mongolia, looks at the
specific problem in that country, which is the government’s ownership of the land typically used by nomadic
communities; this gives those communities little legal recourse, and gives mining companies no reason to pay
particular attention to communities’ needs.
“…there have been several clashes between nomadic communities and mining companies since 2000, but the
mining companies have always won in a legal sense because they have land usage rights to the areas of
concern from the state, which owns land. As a result, nomadic communities have moved away from mining
areas without any significant restoration of lost income or compensation from mining companies. When
mining managers operating in the South Gobi region were asked about the biggest compensation they had
provided to nomadic communities, their answer was that they had sent a “free” truck to make them move out
of the mining area. Such “compensation” to nomadic communities from mining companies is commonplace
and representative in Mongolia.”
(Click here to read the full statement from Amartuvshin Amarjargal)
—–
Vladimir Pacheco, a Senior Social Consultant at Worley Parsons in Australia, makes the important point that
the issue isn’t whether minerals should be extracted or not, but rather how the profits from those extractions
are apportioned. How could money flow back to the local communities in amounts that create real benefits for
them?
“I think that through some systems of benefit-sharing we could make it a win- win situation. At the moment
the problem is that the benefit-sharing systems we have are not strong enough. For instance the taxation system
that we have in Australia for mining companies [is] one where…the government taxes the companies, but it
also gives them back a lot of that tax. In other words, it subsidises a lot of the business. So the state ends up
paying a lot for that resource, and the companies keep the profits…”