adminWhen Guinea’s government pledged to open its vast iron-ore reserves this year after countless delays, Moïse Foulah prepared for a boom. His business, after all, is selling explosives to mining companies – and they were piling into Guinea and its neighbours. Instead, a promising corner of the global economic frontier is pocked with stalled mining projects. The Ebola epidemic has scared off ships and planes; prompted expatriates to abandon their posts; and delayed the rollout of thousands of jobs meant for residents of the three poor West African countries hardest hit by the virus: Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
“All the projects are at a standstill,” said Foulah, chief executive of the mining-explosives firm ECP Guinée.
Steel giant ArcelorMittal SA has delayed a $1,7 billion expansion at its iron-ore mine in Liberia. One of Sierra Leone’s biggest investors, London Mining PLC, filed for bankruptcy last month after falling iron-ore prices and Ebola concerns hampered its ability to attract financing to address long-standing woes. And in Guinea, Rio Tinto PLC has stopped work on a $20 billion iron-ore mine deep in territory hard hit by the virus.
As a result, the sector that officials in the region were counting on to pull their poor nations out of poverty has become a victim of the worst Ebola outbreak on record.
“We thought we were forging ahead,” says Etweda Cooper, superintendent of Liberia’s Grand Bassa County, the region surrounding ArcelorMittal’s Buchanan port.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Guinea holds two-thirds of the world’s bauxite reserves, a key ingredient in aluminum, and massive iron-ore deposits.
Liberia and Sierra Leone boast troves of diamonds, gold and iron ore.
But in March, the first cases of the viral hemorrhagic fever were confirmed in Guinea.
Executives counting on mining projects in the region thought the outbreak would flare up and recede as it has previously in parts of East and Central Africa.
Then cases of Ebola began to crop up in the villages and extended families of ArcelorMittal’s Liberian employees. The company built a new medical clinic.
It installed jugs of chlorinated water and started temperature checks around its mine and the sprawling port in Buchanan.
Even so, hundreds of ArcelorMittal’s contractors pulled out of the country in August as the epidemic spread to Liberia’s capital, Monrovia.
Now a three-storey steel ship-loader, the largest piece of industrial machinery ever imported into Liberia, looms unused above the Buchanan port.
An overgrown lot is piled high with shipping containers full of construction equipment.
Also on hold is ArcelorMittal’s plan to hire some 2 000 people to help it triple the amount of iron-ore it unearths each year in a country with scant opportunities for formal work.
“The more ore we move, the more everybody earns, including the government,” said Denis Foulds, the Luxembourg-based steelmaker’s head of port-and-rail logistics in Liberia.
Operations continue, Foulds said, but the expansion is on hold. “I don’t know when that will change.”
Officials worry the pullback could set development back by a decade in a region that only recently escaped a cycle of war and political turmoil. – Wires.
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