Experimental Seabed Mining. The latest frontier that science has come up with to satisfy other (as in NOT Papua New Guinea’s) man’s craves for mineral resources.
The Centre for Environmental Law and Community Rights in Papua New Guinea (PNG) and MiningWatch Canada and have released a new report called “Out of Our Depth”. It details serious environmental and social impacts expected as a result of unprecedented mining of the ocean floor in PNG.
Papua New Guinea suffers chronically from the way in which state equity participation is negotiated in major resource extraction projects.
A combination of the worst possible behaviour from international resource companies, which is as bad in PNG as it is in any country in the world, abetted by the incompetence of the National Government in negotiating equity participation, means that PNG ends up seeing its resources shipped offshore with the lowest possible returns to the Nation.
