4 - Sunday, March 10, 1985 - North Share News

Mining megatrend

has a certain amount of historical interest

TT: collapse of the miners’ strike in the U.K.

beyond its immediate impact on the labor movement in Britain or what it means in terms of the political fortunes of Ms. Margaret Thatcher.

Even though you’d hardly know it in British Columbia, mining is still the Number 2 industry, isn’t it? Surely the disaster of northeastern coal — if that’s what it turns out to be — is bound to have repercussions on us all.

Mining executives — and miners themselves, you can be sure — are dismayed.

. Slump has followed slum;z.

with. 10 intervening boon:.

With gold: plunging instead’ . of takirg off for the skies (as certain experts confidently predicted), with copper, lead, zinc and silver all at abysmal price levels, a lot of mines are approaching the point where they can’t opereate profi tably any more.

Look at some of the giants who have already caved in. Placer closed its molybdenum mine at En- dako. Noranda and Teck are

“oughts’’ and ‘‘shoulds”’ and ‘‘ifs’? to face. The viability of the B.C, Rai! spur line, among other things, is at stake. Japanese shareholders ae uneasy.

The dotiom line for B.C.’s mining industry is the threat of losing out in a struggfe for a new world economic order. It’s not that the dollar value of raw materials is changing so. dramatically as it is that the resource market is getting kind of crowded, with some bona fide new heavyweights entering the field. In all of this, Canada —- but par- ticularly B.C. — stands to fall behind.

Late fast year, Business Week Magazine practically wrote the obituary on min- ing. It’s not just Canadian

in retreat. And even mighty -: ae

Amax gave up at its Kistauit-.. site — much to the relief of ” locals, mostly Indians, whose *. fishing. grounds were being © ‘contaminated, .. * The poi ant is, By c.. S irap- | ped in a bad situation. The Socreds have perhaps staked their political -lives. on” the. boon of northeastern ‘coal, which, if ‘everything. had -: : worked perfectly,;would have, hoisted the economy up by its © own bootstraps: By . bicom- tag a major. coal exporter, B.C. should. have been in’a . nice spot from. which:to fi ght the energy wars of, the: com.” ing years, ~ When the Bulimoos e “and: Quintette coal fields: reach - full production, they- ought:: to. be able to; generate $1": ‘pillion a year... But, ‘there . are all those

Alan Keely

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It’s small. It’s a good place to learn.

lle a

mines that are in trouble. The 10 largest American mines lost nearly $2 billion last year. Almost two-thirds of the continent’s miners have been laid off.

Why? We may be caught in a megatrend, witnessing the shift of the production and processing of raw materials away from the industrialized countries to developing Third World nations like Chile, which will soon be the world’s largest copper pro- ducer, and Brazil, where the biggest iron ore mine in the world is gearing up for production.

ft is an ironic reverberation from the world debt pro- blem, triggered by greedy Western bankers. Desperate Third World countries have virtually no choice but to sell copper or iron or anything

See page 5

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