COMMODITY busts have left more of a mark on the barren mining region of northern Chile than the booms that preceded them. On the road to Sierra Gorda, a ramshackle copper-mining village in the middle of the Atacama Desert, dusty adobe cemeteries hold the remains of hundreds who died in penury after exports of potassium nitrate, or saltpetre, collapsed in the decade after the first world war.
Sierra Gorda itself looks like it is heading toward a similar decrepitude, despite huge copper mines carved into the hills around it. Chile, the world’s biggest copper producer, was a big beneficiary of the China-led commodities boom, yet the only hints of the past decade of high copper prices are newly installed streetlights. The sole open business on a recent afternoon was a woman selling empañadas from a tatty tent by the roadside.
From Chile to China the sense that another once-in-a-generation raw-materials boom has come to a definitive end is haunting global commodities markets. On December 9th shares of mining and oil companies took a fresh battering as iron-ore prices sank below $40 a tonne for the first time in a...Continue reading
from Economics http://ift.tt/1IXrTgy
via IFTTT
No comments:
Post a Comment