Responsible Mining: Working in partnership for sustainable development
Brussels 01/12/2015, by Vanja Biševac
On 1 December, 2015 at 12:30h, Mr. Bogdan Wenta (MEP), member of the Committee on Development and rapporteur of the Conflict minerals document, hosted the European Parliament work session on Responsible Mining and working in partnership for sustainable development. The meeting brought together different point of views represented by the policy makers (Signe Ratso from DG Trade, Roberto Ridolfi from DG Devco and Flor Diaz Pulido from DG Grow), mining industry (Hugo Bague and Simon Wake from Rio Tinto), European external action service (Guus Houttuin) and NGOs (Yadira Orsini from International Alert).
The general message of the meeting was that mining community should work with others and others should work with mining community. Everybody agreed that mining activities provide great potential for economic growth and brings prosperity to host countries. This can be accomplished only by responsible exploration and exploitation of natural resources and sustainable development. Partnership, structural dialog and better cooperation between private companies, policy makers as well as national, regional or local governments and all other stakeholders is crucial along this process.
The industry representatives pointed out the horizontal and vertical inconsistences in the government regulations as main problem they are commonly encountering. The discrepancies between national and local authorities are often seen and solving this requires significant effort to persuade local authorities to play according to national laws and rules. Illegal activities are often offered. Furthermore, stability of the legal and tax standards and norms are also important during planning and implementation of new projects. After all, mining is always a long-term investment.
Policy makers are aware of their important role regarding responsible mining and sustainable development as well as importance of the mining companies in the supply chain. They always encourage new investments but in a responsible, effective and transparent way. The European Commission (EC) document Trade for All – New EU Trade and Investment Strategy (http://ec.europa.eu/trade/policy/in-focus/new-trade-strategy/) should increase stability and make investments more reliable. Also, the EC is currently very active in promotion of such activities as well as EU values (especially human rights) in other countries (e.g. China, Columbia, Mexico or Chile) which could be interesting to potential investors. On the other hand, the role of EU is also to assist the potential host countries to get the best deals while negotiating with the potential investors and also to support additionality (the local community should benefit from the mining sites accompanying infrastructure like railways or roads). The EC promotes structured dialog with private sector in effective and transparent way together with domestic source mobilization (capacity of negotiations) and civil society involvement into negotiations. The EC sees multilateral and lateral dialog together with Horizon2020 activities (e.g. INTRAW Project) as best practice in achieving goals set by the industry such as government involvement resulting in same principles and values to be used for all investments and investors, increase capability of investments and education and training together with environment protection. In the end, all participants of the meeting agreed that the mining operations should be considered as a win-win situation.
The meeting ended at 14:00h.
