Mining chamber targeting neighbors for investments

MANILA, Philippines - The Philippine mining industry is targeting neighboring economies for investments in order to weather the financial crisis now racking western markets, a chamber official Wednesday said. "Although we are seeing a [financial] difficulty in Europe and the United States, some of the slack would be picked up by China, India and Middle East," Benjamin Philip G. Romualdez, president of the Chamber of Mines of the Philippines, said during a conference hosted Wednesday by the National Competitiveness Council. For instance, the United Arab Emirates has $1.1 trillion set aside for investments, Mr. Romualdez noted. "In the next 10-15 years, Asia Pacific would be driving the world economy and China and India would be the growth drivers," Mr. Romualdez said. As of the first half of the year, mining investments totaled $1.62 billion since 2004, when the Supreme Court allowed complete foreign ownership of mining ventures, data from the Mines bureau showed. The government expects to have netted some $10 billion in mining investments by 2011. Forty-one mining projects — 24 gold projects, 12 copper-gold projects, three nickel projects, one bauxite and one sulfur project — need at least $500 million to complete their exploration stage, Mr. Romualdez said. But the Philippines will increasingly have to compete with Southeast Asian neighbors like Indonesia and Malaysia, as well as Latin American countries like Brazil and Peru for mining investments, Glenn M. Noble, chief of the Mines and Geosciences Bureau’s Mineral Economics Information and Publication Division, said in an interview Wednesday. — Neil Jerome C. Morales, BusinessWorld