Monday, June 14, 2010
Mining
I suspect that the mining in Afghanistan will end up being heavy on machinery and won't be deep-rock labor-intensive, unless the Afghans import Chinese miners to do it for them.
Whatever, we're probably talking a decade or more before minerals start coming out of Afghanistan in any significant amount. There are no railroads worth a crap in the country. 99% of the roads are dirt tracks that would not have rated a second glace in the days of the Mongols.
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4 comments:
Good cut.
Hope and darkness. Afgan economy has always been hope and darkness. Hope fot the farmer was poppy, cash crop and the darkness was drugs and the corruption.
Maybe it will be mining. Likely it will start like the gold, silver and copper mines and the mining towns or the old west. Hope and darkness.
However, over time a poverty economy
can become industrial or a better mix of both. No way to know but, what it is now doesn't have to remain.
For a while I lived in the hills of Pa
and the local were a mix of old Dutch German farmers. Heard this once from
an old marginal farm owner.
Certain thing, keep doin same, Same happens.
Eck!
The big question is will Ahmed Karzai and Mullah Omar form one big security company protecting the gold shipments or will they set up rival companies and just keep fighting?
1. Railroads in Afghanistan are amazing, and not in a good way. The little bit of rail they do have is in four different widths, leaving them with some awful decisions, and they are extremely unenthusiastic about having direct rail contact with either China or Russia for defense reasons.
2. Discovery of major natural resources can often be the worst thing for a country's attempts at democracy and nation-building since the influx of foreign money concentrates in the hands of the people who control the resources, drives out manufacturing and industry because foreign goods become cheap for those who do have money, and the resource exploitation business sucks up all the brightest people, rather than them developing other wider-based industries. Friedman has written about this in "hot, flat, and crowded" as regards petroleum-based economies, showing a strong correlation between income from a single natural resource, increases in government repression, and decreases in sustaining employment.
Good point about repression and national economies built on resource extraction. Russia has become a fine example of this, as well.
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