Mining and Economic Development of any Country | Essay | Geography

In this essay we will discuss about how mining has contributed to the economic development of many countries.

Mining and the processing of minerals inevitably have effects on the economies of countries with large or valuable mineral resources.

Few minerals have had as profound an effect as coal but they do influence the economy in a number of ways, which may be summarized as follows:

1. They provide employment opportunities. In some countries, especially developing countries, this may be more important than others, depending on the variety of other opportunities available.

2. They stimulate the development of transport links to places which might otherwise be inaccessible.

3. Population may move to mining sites and thus settle hitherto undeveloped parts of a country. Towns growing up around mines provide employment in service trades and perhaps in processing industries as­sociated with the minerals.

4. Export earnings may be increased, especially in developing countries and the royalties and taxes exacted by governments may be used to improve agriculture and industry.

5. Domestic industries associated with the metals may be stimulated in agricultural or little industrialized countries.

6. Mining may in the long term have detrimental effects in the form of dereliction when exhausted workings are abandoned.

7. Decline in mining activity may leave areas of a country depressed, with problems of unemployment and declining industry.

The way in which such factors affect different countries is best brought out by considering a number of countries in detail.

Mauritania:

Iron ore was first exploited in the 1960s and the country’s export earnings from the ore became the backbone of the economy. Before iron was discovered and worked the largely desert country had a traditional agricultural society with livestock- rearing nomads in the north and more settled agri­culturalists in the oases and in the southern districts.

There were few if any exports and it was necessary to import grain in bad years so that the revolution in the balance of payments situation effected by the iron ore development was highly beneficial.

The population of the country was small and there­fore the new job opportunities in the mines, in build­ing and maintaining the railway from mines to coast, and in transhipping the ore and running the port facilities at Nouadhibou were considerable. The rail­way itself was a major engineering feat and opened up the northern part of the country.

The mines attracted population to the desert north and gave rise to new settlements with shops, cinemas and schools. These in turn attracted nomads to settle in the area. The relative importance of the north and south of the country was completely reversed.

Long-term effects may not all be beneficial especial­ly when reserves run low and the mines are no longer economic to run. Abandonment of agricultural pur­suits may lead to increased urban unemployment and excessive settlement in desert areas may lead to the over-exploitation of underground water and the over­use of such scrub vegetation as exists for firewood, leading to increased desertification.

The importance of mining may blind administrators to the needs of agriculture, which is more difficult to develop but which, in the long term, could be more valuable. The effects of some of these factors in Mauritania cannot yet be assessed.

Zaire and Zambia:

Mining of copper, cobalt and other minerals in the Copper Belt of Katanga, Zaire and of Zambia has been going on since the early twentieth century and has brought in its train the development of concentrating and refining plants, industries serving the mines such as the manufacture of explosives and other industrial development.

In both countries mining began under colonial administrations and the financial independence that it pro­vided was a major factor in establishing the viability of the former colonies as independent countries. The mines provide important employment opportunities, good wages by national standards and have led to the growth of towns and of road and rail links which serve both the mines and the population centres.

The situation of these countries today, however, illustrates some of the difficulties faced by develop­ing countries in getting the best returns from their mineral resources. A world-wide recession has reduced income from exports in the last few years but this is less significant than internal problems which have led to declining output.

The biggest single problem for the land-locked Copper Belt is transport. Roads through Zaire, the Benguela Railway through Angola, roads in Zambia and in recent years the Tanzara (formerly Tanzam) Railway to Dar es Salaam on the Tanzanian coast, as well as a rail route through Zim­babwe and South Africa all link the Copper Belt with the sea.

However, civil war in Angola has effectively closed the Benguela Railway and both track and roll­ing stock need vast sums spent on them to make them safe again, even if they were politically secure. The road network in Zaire, once of reasonable standard and very extensive, has been allowed to decay since independence so that whole sections of the country are now inaccessible and copper exports cannot go that way.

Roads in Zambia are better, but even here the length of time taken to ship copper by road has doubled in the last few years. Zambia, too is reliant on the road network of Tanzania over which it has no control. The Tanzara Railway, built with Chinese aid, was only handed over to the Tanzanian and Zambian governments in 1976 but is already critically in need of repair. Track has not been maintained, locomotives have broken down and even rolling stock is in a bad state.

Rail transit time to the coast doubled between 1977 and 1978 and by either rail or road it now takes three weeks or more for copper to reach Dar es Salaam, where further delays occur since the port is extremely inefficient. Although Zaire has exported its copper through Zimbabwe and South Africa in recent years, Zambia felt unable to use this route before Zimbabwe became independent, for political reason’s.

The delay and difficulty of exporting the minerals has reduced sales and therefore income so that mines have not been able to afford to undertake further ex­ploration necessary to maintain production. Moreover the transport problems of the region have been ex­acerbated by civil wars in Angola and pre-independence Zimbabwe, by insurgency in Katanga and growing violence in the Zambian Copper Belt.

This political insecurity has kept away the expatriate staff ‘vital to the smooth operation of the mines. Both Zambia and Zaire now have only about half the number of expatriate personnel they need and this, together with a shortage of cash is leading to inefficient production and a decline in output. De­cline in earnings is making it ever more difficult for the governments to maintain the transport network.

The case of the Copper Belt illustrates the problems of dependence on minerals when other aspects of the economy cannot be made efficient, though problems in land-locked central Africa are far worse than in countries where minerals have easy access to export markets.

In Papua New Guinea, for example, trans­port from the island copper mine of Bougainville is simple-but there are other problems since Bougain­ville threatens to secede because its income is sub­sidizing the rest of the country and it considers this unfair.

Malaysia:

The development of the Malaysian economy owes a great deal to the exploitation of tin. It began to be exploited on a large scale in the early twentieth century and it attracted European invest­ment and both investment and immigration by Chinese workers. The development of tin mining mainly on the western coastal plain of Peninsular Malaysia helped to develop the road and rail network.

The main north- south road and railway linked the various tin fields while east-west roads and railways linked them to the ports on the Strait of Malacca. The road and rail network also helped the rubber planta­tions which were developing at the same time to find a ready outlet to the sea. This early development set the pattern for much future development and economic growth so that the western part of Penin­sular Malaysia still has the bulk of the country’s in­dustry, commerce and population.

The tin mines attracted immigrants from China who settled in the country, later marrying and having families so that towns and villages grew up and trade and commerce flourished as well as primary produc­tion. The tin-mining regions still have large Chinese populations today and thus the mining affected not only population density but also, to some extent, its racial distribution.

Tin mining has not exerted a strong enough pull to attract tin-plate production or other metal working industries to any great extent but by enlarging the population and improving communications, as well as providing export income, it has helped to create the conditions in which other industries can prosper.

Malaysia suffers from its share of despoilation of the landscape by mineral workings but is unlikely to suffer very seriously if reserves were eventually ex­hausted since the country is by no means solely de­pendent on tin exports. Apart from long established rubber exports the newer crops such as oil palm and cocoa and other resources such as timber and oil and natural gas should cushion the effect of a decline in the tin industry if and when this takes place.

Australia:

As in many other countries the dis­covery of gold and the subsequent ‘gold rush’ was one of several attractions which brought people from all over the world to settle in Australia in the late nine­teenth and early twentieth century, and which helped to spread population across the continent.

Minerals, however, were only some of a wide variety of re­sources possessed by Australia and although mineral extraction continued to develop in the first half of the twentieth century agriculture has always been more important and has done more to attract per­manent settlement than mining.

Many of the mines were in desert and savanna regions, far from the major cities and with conditions too marginal to encourage all round development, but they did stimulate the building of a network of railways and roads to take ores to the ports or to the cities for processing. These have developed into a transcontinental network of communications.

Gold at Kalgoorlie, copper at Mount Isa, lead and zinc at Broken Hill and many other mineral deposits were mined for half a century and are still important today, but in the 1960s Australia discovered and de­veloped a whole new range of mineral deposits includ­ing bauxite at Weipa and Gove in the north and at Jarrahdale in the south-west; nickel at Kalgoorlie and nearby Kambalda in Western Australia and Greenvale in Queensland; manganese at Groot Eylandt in the Gulf of Carpentaria, at Mount Sydney in Western Australia and Bell Bay in Tasmania; as well as large new reserves of iron ore in the Pilbara district of Western Australia and inland of Darwin in the North­ern Territory; a new source of copper, lead and zinc at Cobar in New South Wales; new reserves of coal in New South Wales and Queensland and oil and gas in several parts of the country.

The development of these resources has brought additional wealth to the country and has greatly in­creased exports, especially to Japan which also has a large financial stake in mineral exploitation. It has also led to the development of new settlements, ports and railways and new concentration and smelting plants, some near the mines and others in existing in­dustrial areas, particularly around Perth, Gladstone and Melbourne.

All these changes, however, have had little overall effect on the pattern of the Australian economy for mining and metal processing still only account for about 4 per cent of total employment. This reflects Australia’s status as a developed country with a diversified economy and a large range of in­dustrial and tertiary employment.

Mining development in Australia has, on the other hand, met more opposition than in the other coun­tries already described. It has been opposed by some sections of the population on one or more of the fol­lowing counts. It is felt necessary to conserve supplies of minerals for future domestic use rather than ex­porting the bulk of production. The heavy invest­ment from overseas is regarded as a threat to au­tonomy, and control by foreign capital has been op­posed. The detrimental effects on the environment have been increasingly recognized.

Newly found de­posits of uranium have not yet been developed be­cause of the strong public opinion against this, especially in the Northern Territory, and, according to one source, the issue has become ‘one of the most divisive in Australian society’ in recent years. Environ­mentalists have also objected to increased bauxite ex­traction south of Perth because it would mean the removal of much of the remaining Jarra forest and it is feared that it would affect both the quantity and salinity of water supplies as a result.