SPOILING TIBET by Gabriel Lafitte
Reviewed by Sudhirendar Sharma, Development Analyst and Columnist, New Delhi, India
Spoiling Tibet, by Gabriel Lafitte, Zed Books, 2014
If current geological estimations are any indication, there are 80 million tonnes of copper, 2,000 tonnes of gold and 30 million tonnes of lead and zinc extractable from the Tibetan plateau. The cumulative value of these recoverable metals is US$ 420 billion. To imagine that the Chinese would have ripped apart the rooftop to the world in search of an embedded fortune is far from true because, as things stand, the region is cold, its air is perilously thin, its people are unwelcoming and it is poor in infrastructure.
But all this is to going to change as China’s 12th Five-Year Plan, ending in 2015, calls for massive investment in copper, gold, silver, chromium and molybdenum mining in the region. With an aim to achieve 30 per cent self-sufficiency in copper production by the end of the plan period, a state-driven agglomeration of the entire Chinese copper industry will be sufficiently capitalized to finance major expansions in Tibet, which is fast becoming China’s new copper production base. The Tibetan plateau – almost one-sixtieth of the entire global landscape – will be the object of intensive and potentially devastating mining and extraction projects in the years ahead. The signs are ominous!
Without a doubt, Gabriel Lafitte has profound knowledge about this landscape, its people and their cultural resistance. They want to protect the inner strengths of Tibet, cultivated in solitude in the mountains. Given the ecological fragility of the region, mining activities in the watersheds of major rivers, most of which are transboundary, will have a serious impact on hundreds of millions of people downstream in South and South East Asia. China’s track record on environmental concerns evokes little confidence.
Spoiling Tibet is a timely warning to the world about China’s hunger for mineral wealth, and the unscrupulous manner in which this wealth may well be extracted. In the Chinese growth agenda, mining plays a major role, one that will silence the feeble voices of resistance by increasing the non-Tibetan population in the region through mass tourism. But given its global implications, the world should not permit unilateral desecration of its roof top!
