Word: copper
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Officials in Kolwezi, the copper center that had temporarily been held by the rebels, said it would take at least six months to reopen the mines?and longer, no doubt, to lure back the European specialists needed to help run them. Most of the city's 2,250 whites had been airlifted to safety in Belgium as legionnaires liberated the city. A dozen staff members of the huge Gécamines copper complex returned to hold their regular monthly payday for 13,000 African employees, though not much work was being done. At the main cobalt plant in Kolwezi, only...
...Mobutu and Zaïre, that would mean disaster. The copper and cobalt mines of Shaba are responsible for two-thirds of the nation's foreign exchange earnings, and Zaïre needs them to survive. Although the region was relatively calm last week, no one precluded the possibility of another rebel attack from across the border, or of a general uprising by a population suffering from severe poverty and the oppression of its country's own plundering army...
...industries. But the majority of LDCS have been knocked backward in the 1970s by a devastating one-two punch: oil price boosts that have raised the cost of running the most primitive factories and farm machines, and recession in the industrial world that has restricted markets for cotton, copper, cocoa, tin and other raw materials sold by less developed lands. In many countries of Asia and Africa, economic growth rates have dropped to around 2% a year - not enough to keep up with population expansion, which averages 2.6% for the LDCs. The poor countries have borrowed a staggering $200 billion...
...industrial countries should also join with the poor lands in agreements to stabilize the prices of raw materials such as copper, coffee, tin, bauxite and manganese. Partners in these agreements would set up common funds to buy and stockpile commodities when prices plunge, sell off the stocks when shortages send prices soaring...
...European exodus would mean economic disaster for Zaïre, which does not have enough competent black technicians and managers to run the shuttered copper mines that provide about two-thirds of the country's foreign exchange earnings. Belgium's mine holdings were nationalized eleven years ago, but Belgians continue to run them and to export much of their product to Europe. Even if all the whites who worked at the vast Gé;camines mines that dominate Kolwezi could be lured back, it could still, after the last weeks' destruction, require up to a year...