JULY/AUGUST 1996 · VOLUME 17 · NUMBERS 7 & 8
L E T T E R S T O T H E E D I T O R
JULY/AUGUST 1996 · VOLUME 17 · NUMBERS 7 & 8
L E T T E R S T O T H E E D I T O R
WITH RESPECT TO two recent items in Multinational Monitor:
1. The editorial on budgets ["Budget Sense," Multinational Monitor, April 1996] is outstanding. Except for some of my work, I haven't seen anywhere else the idea that deficits can be needed to prevent recessions. Even the allegedly "liberal" economists, e.g., Robert Eisner, do not go in that direction. They all stay with after-the-fact Keynesianism. Data I have collected -- showing an absolute correlation between major recessions in U.S. history and attempts to cut the budget deficit -- are wholly compatible with the argument in the editorial, and fill in the evidence to go along with your broad argument. On this one, a loud Bravo!
2. On mergers [Multinational Monitor, June 1996], I think you're operating at cross purposes. In your analysis, you allow that mergers can be connected with excess capacity and the need for overall downsizing, and you use the old example of hospital beds ["An Unhealthy Merger Policy"]. The Walter Adams stuff ["Revitalizing Antitrust: An Interview with Walter Adams and James Brock"], however, proceeds from the old Say's Law basis that mergers are not necessary because overcapacity, overproduction, excessive competition are impossible. This is just manifestly untrue, but it is ancient economic principle. Thus, the Adams interview, as I see it, contradicts your article in regard to basic premises.
Note that mergermania has become prominent in industries that have been deregulated in recent times. The sequence goes from more competition to overproduction, mergers, downsizing.
I personally think you should basically be supporting a single-payer health care system along with price-regulated fees for service. With a new concept of "entitlements," there should be mandatory physical exams for all citizens at frequencies determined to be in the public interest. This is in connection with the duty to be available as standby workers, etc.
Ultimately, the supply of medical professionals will have to be regulated and subsidized via the system of "teaching hospitals."
Also ultimately, regulation, not competition, is the only hope in hospitals and health care. The problem Ralph Nader first mentioned 20 years ago was too many beds, but now you sort of hope the FTC will keep competition alive by having lots of empty beds.
Frederick Thayer,
Graduate School of Public
and International Affairs
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA
Porgera Revisited
A PIECE BY DANNY KENNEDY on the Porgera mine in Multinational Monitor from earlier this year has recently been brought to my attention ["Ok Tedi All Over Again: Placer and the Porgera Gold Mine," Multinational Monitor, March 1996]. Given that I was named in the article I would like the chance to comment on a number of points.
Firstly, as Danny well knows, I do not work for the Porgera Joint Venture. For the last four years I have been writing a Ph.D. thesis at the Australian National University on the Porgera mine and its relationship with the local community. Between 1992 and 1994 I was employed as a consultant by Unisearch (PNG) Pty Ltd, the consultancy arm of the University of Papua New Guinea, for short periods to carry out independent socio-economic monitoring of the mine, a requirement of the National Government (which incidentally is exactly the type of monitoring that the Minerals Policy Institute (MPI) wants done). For Danny to claim I am working for the PJV is simply mischievous and wrong.
Secondly, I stand by the statement that he quoted me on [that critics overestimated the number of people directly affected by the mine's pollution], and since I have now read the honors thesis by Phil Shearman on which the MPI document is based, I find that Shearman himself lists the villages of the Strickland catchment and their populations: a total of 800 people only 400 of whom are within the 140 kilometer mixing zone. Shearman's population figures include villages up to 10 kilometers away from the river, so it is not simply those who live directly on the riverbank. While other people may come into contact from time to time with the waters of the Strickland (such as those who live at Lake Kopiago, upstream of and 25 kilometers away from the Strickland), impacts on health are only realistic from this type of contact through acute poisoning; and for that you need high levels of dissolved or soluble metals in the river. One of the few points of agreement between the PJV and the MPI is that these dissolved levels of metals are very low, and to quote Danny Kennedy "within acceptable limits."
I have many other points of contention with Kennedy's article -- he gets some basic facts wrong. For example, the state does not own 25 percent of the mine; unfortunately the Porgera landowners own 5 percent, the Enga Provincial Government 5 percent and the state 15 percent. I say unfortunately, because local landowners owning 5 percent of the mine operation does not fit with his attempt to portray the mining company as making huge profits at the expense of the local community -- huge profits suit the community very well.
The biggest gripe the "traditional Porgerans" have against the tailings and sediment is that they are covering up the alluvial gold which they had been mining for 35 years. It is in this area that total metals levels (which includes the insoluble component) are "staggering," and yet in this area the claims are for loss of income, not death.
In terms of my own position:
(1) I do not pretend to approve of tailings disposal to river systems. That said, if there are no other options, or the technology is not available for other options, then so long as the tailings and other waste are not causing harm to the human population, and there is no long term damage to the environment, and adequate and appropriate compensation is provided to those affected, and the mine itself brings benefits to local populations and the economy as a whole, all of which has happened at Porgera, then I don't think it is a bad alternative. If safe, viable alternatives exist then I would be the first to encourage the company to use them -- for one thing, the nature of compensation claims in contemporary Papua New Guinea is such that tailings disposal to rivers in the wake of Ok Tedi is politically dangerous, ecological considerations aside.
(2) I do not believe that the tailings are toxic, and I do not believe that the health of people in the communities downstream is detrimentally affected. I will come to the evidence for these statements in a moment. The most compelling question which remains is then, why are people making claims about deaths downstream? The answer is, I believe, complex.
Firstly, people are dying in these communities, and have done so over the past seven years, and for many generations earlier. Health services in remote parts of rural Papua New Guinea have declined in recent years, so people (especially the young and the old) are still dying of things that they shouldn't be.
Secondly, as Kennedy indicates, sorcery and poison are still regarded as important causes of death in these communities, as in many (most?) rural Papua New Guinean societies. Don't take my word for it, read some anthropology from Papua New Guinea. However, Kennedy then takes this a step further and argues that people are dying because they believe the river is being poisoned, a proposition which despite his claim is NOT supported by the work of Shearman. It is also NOT the claim of an anthropologist working in the area who has written on Duna perceptions of landscape change, and whom Shearman quotes from.
Thirdly, compensation holds a special place in Papua New Guinea today. Dr. Colin Filer of the National Research Institute in Port Moresby has eloquently described the 'ideology of landownership and compensation' which has developed in Papua New Guinea in the last decade, largely as a consequence of these large-scale resource developments. In a large extent, compensation is the form of development that communities expect from mining companies. The national ideological status of 'compensation,' described so accurately by Filer, cannot be divorced from the context of these claims, as Kennedy and the MPI try to do.
Fourthly, I am sure that as Brian Brunton has said, some of the people in the area are genuine in their belief that mining is killing people (and I am sure that this attitude is being entrenched in these communities by the visits from activists who are also telling them that the metals in the river are just like acid, for example), but that is not the full answer. Within any community there are always a range of interests -- and some people in these communities are obviously interested in compensation, as evidenced by the above claim that I referred to.
(3) That obviously is the long answer. The short easy answer is to say that people are dying as a result of being poisoned. How can I be certain that this is not occurring? Primarily because the PJV does have studies and tests carried out by independent specialists on different aspects of the river system and the impact of the mine. I haven't seen all these, but those I have seen indicate that the impacts are not affecting health, and that the river system will survive the impact of the mine.
Why is the company not making these studies available to satisfy their critics? I wish I knew, and it is something I have encouraged, with both my work, and the work of others, but as I stated earlier, I'm not a company person, and cannot speak for them. In my view, the companies have not handled the recent attention of the Australian NGOs as well as they could have, but then again they are mining companies, not public affairs companies, and they are up against activists who are well-versed in dealing with the media.
Glenn Banks,
The Institute of Advanced Studies
Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies
Department of Human Geography
The Australian National University
Canberra, Australia