Word: mines
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Ramu site had lain dormant for four decades, as a series of Australian firms calculated that the low-grade nickel wasn't worth extracting in such a remote area rife with shifting clan allegiances. But Ramu NiCo, the subsidiary of China Metallurgical Group that has developed the mine, thought it could succeed where others were afraid to try. In 2007, Ramu NiCo dispatched battalions of Chinese workers, who macheted their way through dense foliage and built a mirage-like Chinatown where elephant grass and kwila trees used to be. Today, in what was a malarial stretch of hills and valley...
...Labor issues are compounded by environmental concerns voiced by international academics. The Australia-based Mineral Policy Institute believes that Ramu NiCo's assurances about mine-waste disposal in the Basamuk Bay not poisoning the fish-rich waters are based on "fatally flawed" data. (Other Chinese companies have been accused of importing vast amounts of illegal timber from P.N.G.'s dwindling forests, even as Beijing tries to protect its own natural bounty by cracking down on illicit logging at home.) "With other countries, we try to make foreign companies accountable by lobbying shareholders or raising public awareness in that country," says...
...Ramu NiCo headquarters in the town of Madang, where the fastest pace of life is set by swarms of flying foxes, boasts human-resources and health-and-safety departments. (At four stories, it is the tallest building in town.) Ramu NiCo has expanded several schools and health centers in mine-affected areas and sent P.N.G. engineers on training courses to China. Remarkably for a company owned by the officially atheist Chinese communist state, Ramu NiCo has even funded church activities...
...Most notably, the company has agreed to a 2.5% ownership stake in the mine for a group of local landowners, although many others say they have been iced out of the deal. "For Chinese and Papua New Guineans, who are from such different cultures, it will naturally take some time for us to truly understand each other, and sometimes it is not easy," says Wu Xuefeng, deputy general manager at Ramu NiCo. "Our proposal to tackle all these challenges is to address them within our overall sustainability development framework, [and] we are glad that we have been improving along...
...Still, the P.N.G. government didn't want to risk derailing such a major investment. A compromise was reached, part of which required the Chinese working at the mine to attend English-language classes. Yet not a single Chinese I spoke to at Ramu or Basamuk said they had ever attended any of these language courses. Furthermore, despite assurances that the Chinese working on-site were only engineers or other specialists, I saw Chinese sweeping up construction debris and doing other menial labor that locals could surely do. (See pictures of the making of modern China...