(This is slightly belated – I mean to post this a while back and just found it in my drafts folder – oops)
For a while there it looked like Africa was on the up. Prices for many of the commodities African nations rely on for income were riding high, and had been riding high for a while. The talk was of a ‘super cycle’ where instead of yo-yoing up and down every 10 years, maybe prices would simply stay high due to rising Asian demand that showed no sign of slowing. Many analysts got caught up in what The Economist called ’Africa rising’. However, as is often the case with economic cycles, just as people started thinking they might have gone away for good, they come back. The problem with rising tides is that they go out again. Having ridden high, the mining industry was hit hard by the 2008 financial crash with important consequences for resource-rich African nations reliant on this income. Jobs have been slashed, mining investment and revenues shrunk and many African countries left watching their spending and growth plans upended.
While I was on parental leave this summer an (open access) paper I wrote with colleagues was published looking at the consequences of this. The paper looks at mining in Africa since the 2008 financial crash – where many mineral prices went from being high over the long term to a much more complicated picture of many prices decreasing (though not all). For us this was an important turning point which has reshaped the mining industry’s impact in Africa in four important ways, it has changed: (1) where and how investment is targeted; (2) the level and types of conflict surrounding mining; (3) the strategies and opportunities for African countries to pursue minerals-based development; and (4) opportunities for work in a shrinking and increasingly automated sector with artisanal and small-scale mining gaining importance. Together, the mining industry is changing shape in important ways for African countries and those living and working with the industry. We need to understand these changes better if we want to make mining work for development.
Sound interesting? Link to the open access version below.
The full abstract:
Mining in Africa is at a pivotal moment. For most of the period 2000 to 2012, the extractive industries were in a “supercycle” of sustained high commodity prices. Driven by resource-intensive growth in emerging market economies, these high commodity prices were anticipated to continue for decades to come. However, this “supercycle” ended in 2012 and there followed a severe slump in mineral prices from 2014 onwards. On the one hand, a new era of commodity market dynamics has begun, with changing patterns of economic activity, minerals governance, and environmental regulation. On the other hand, the end of the supercycle has continued or intensified pre-existing trends towards mechanisation, automation, and enclavity, while distributive pressures on companies by local communities and host nations increase. We argue that the end of the supercycle has reconfigured the geographies of extraction in ways that are not yet reflected in existing research or taken into consideration in policy implementation, particularly around corporate strategy, state–business relations, and models for mineral-based development strategies. In this paper we map the terrain of research on the supercycle in Africa and identify emerging post-supercycle trends – some of which have overtaken research. The paper is structured around examining four themes: (1) new geographies of investment and extraction; (2) new geographies of struggle; (3) national minerals-based development; and (4) labour and livelihoods, for which we identify key trends during the supercycle and post-supercycle and areas for future research and policy development.
While I am curious how much has and has not changed as a result of Covid and the pandemic, I suspect that the basic picture we paint here still holds true. Importantly however, is that fact that mineral extraction looks set to rise in the coming years. Pretty much all ways to decarbonise involve a lot of metals – renewables rely on metals for windmill blades, solar panels, batteries and the wires to move electricity around. It is here I intend to focus my future research efforts.
The paper was written with Andrew Bowman, Deborah Fahy Bryceson, John Childs, Emma Gilberthorpe, Susan Newman and came out of a workshop we held in Manchester in 2018. You can read the paper, for free here. Enjoy!
Vein of Thought 