Ron Manners
Why put the World Wildlife Fund in Charge of the Mining Certification Process?
12/4/2003

Over the last ten years big miners have increasingly elected to “get into bed” with anti--mining and environmental activists.

Why? Some argue that they are only recognising the power and support of the environmental movement, that they represent the values of today and the future. Some claim pragmatism, that it is as LBJ colorfully put it, “better to have the enemy pissing out rather than pissing in”. Others claim the persuasive skills to turn them from enemy to supporters. A caveat to all these explanations is that only constructive advocates are welcome in the fold and radicals are kept outside the walls.

As part of this rush to embrace the ‘new stakeholder’, the big mining side of town give environmental extremists credibility, money and power. They have started to abandon old, trusted stakeholders who have not only supported the industry but believe in it.

One outcome of this process has been a significant increase in the cost of doing business. Miners are not only expected to support an extensive array of new stakeholders –who in the main have no direct or indirect relationship with mining or their operation—but introduce a new extra-legal set of regulatory hurdles and requirements. This applies to all miners –big and small; in Australia and overseas.

In short, it has created a new, unnecessary and unproductive barrier to entry. One would not be paranoid in believing that the push to embrace activists on the part of big miners, is in part an attempt to stop competition; to limit the entry of new ore bodies to the market to keep commodity prices up and their own market share intact.

The small and medium size miners have been largely excluded from the process. Their complaints about unnecessary costs have been ignored, they have been excluded from decision making forums and their voice on industry bodies muted.

The Mining Certification Project takes this process a giant step further. The project is a joint venture lead by World Wildlife Fund (WWF). It also includes the big miners, Rio Tinto, BHPB, Placer, Newmont and WMCR as well as Community Aid Abroad, CFMEU and a number of other activist lobby groups.

The aim of the project is to establish means and methods by which so-called ‘independent organisations' such as WWF and CAA can certify the environmental and social standards and performance of mines.

WWF and CAA have a long history of campaigning against mining. Indeed CAA, through its self proclaimed ‘Mining Ombudsman’, has waged campaigns against every large mining venture with Australia equity in the Asia Pacific region and has contributed greatly to the collapse of the industry in Indonesia. Their values, along with WWF are clear –they hate mining. These groups are not community based organisations but a small club of activists. They have no knowledge of, or links to the mining sector or its real stakeholders. As such the big side of town has broken its promise to keep the radicals out, indeed they have financed them and placed them in control.

The Mining Certification Project, supported by the big mining companies, seeks to take the regulatory power over the sector, away from governments and industry and cede it to anti-mining activists. This can only have one purpose and outcome which is to increase the cost of developing new ore bodies and thereby slow the growth of smaller and medium sized miners.

In short it is a modern form of stopping the competition – even “screwing” the competition.

Adam Smith, if alive today, would put it this way …..

“Beware whenever you see large mining companies talking together, as you can be sure that they are conspiring to corner the market and to raise prices.”

Such Mercantilism is a very old and discredited doctrine, but it sticks its head up every time competition is restricted by oppressive regulation.

Will the smaller emerging mining companies and their industry associations, who generally don’t fear competition, motivate themselves to “torpedo” this threat to their livelihood, or will they choose to be “too busy” to bring into focus the kind of leadership required to deal with this threat?

Urgent action is required to ensure that Australia’s next mining generation will have the opportunity to fill the space left by all the mergers and takeovers of the past 5 years.


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Interesting to note that whilst the CSIRO link contains further information, the actual contact there is the World Wildlife Foundation on http://www.minerals.csiro.au/sd/SD_MCEP.htm