Your report on Reko Diq published on January 12 is perhaps the most balanced evaluation of the project thus far.
LAHORE: Your report on Reko Diq published on January 12 is perhaps the most balanced evaluation of the project thus far. However, the comparison with the Saindak Project was not tenable. Saindak has been a disaster; it has been leased out to the Chinese who have been mining the deposits and shipping them back home. After returning from the US in 1992, Saindak was my first project in Pakistan. It was totally mismanaged since the country did not possess any expertise in commercial copper mining. I kept insisting on transfer of management and technology but the powers that be ignored these pleas and it seemed obvious that they were very impressed by the technical know-how of the Chinese contractors.
From 1992 till 1998, we fought to save the project by insisting on a complete transfer of technology so that we could undertake future developments on our own but that did not happen. It is due to this lack of expertise that we are unable to develop Reko Diq indegeniously, since we still do not have any commercial experience of mining copper.
There are three stages in every mining project: exploration, development and production. Unfortunately, as a nation, we take shortcuts and do not do proper homework. When we get stuck with unfavourable terms, as is the case with Reko Diq, we come up with ad hoc solutions. As a policy, all projects should be taken up to the development phase before involving production companies. Commercially, Reko Diq will be a bigger disaster than Saindak if real professionals with commercial mining experience are not involved. Both Balochistan and Pakistan must benefit from its natural resources but that will only be possible if proper frameworks/protocols are developed and followed.
Dr Farid A Malik
Published in The Express Tribune, January 14th, 2011.
