Anosy - Mining

Mining

Mining has been occurring in Anosy for at least the last 100 years as Mica has been an export since the early 1900s, Uranothorianite was mined from the 1950s to the mid-1960s, for several years being Madagascar's second most valuable export. Sapphires briefly became a major export in the early- to mid-1990s and today Qit Mining Madagascar (QMM), which is 80 percent Rio Tinto and 20 percent Malagasy government) is exporting 750,000 tons per year of Ilmenite, along with 40,000 tons per year of Rutile and Zircon. There are also major deposits of bauxite and prospecting is ongoing for uranium as well as a variety of rare earth minerals.

While quite a bit of mining has been done in Anosy over the last 60 years, a paraphrased translation of a 2002 post in Malagasy on the internet shared skepticism of the benefits to Malagasy of the mining which has occurred in Anosy to date:

  • Is Manantenina, the town near the major Bauxite deposit in Anosy, progressing today?
  • How many large stone houses are left in Ambatomika where Uranium was mined?
  • How many schools were built in Sarisambo with funds from the Monazite mined there?
  • What is left in Andranodambo where Sapphires were mined? Holes are the only souvenirs left here.
  • What are the benefits left in the Tranomaro area where Mica was mined?"

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Famous quotes containing the word mining:

    “In strict science, all persons underlie the same condition of an infinite remoteness. Shall we fear to cool our love by mining for the metaphysical foundation of this elysian temple? Shall I not be as real as the things I see? If I am, I shall not fear to know them for what they are.”
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    “For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making “ladies” dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.”
    —Stephanie Coontz (20th century)

    “Any relation to the land, the habit of tilling it, or mining it, or even hunting on it, generates the feeling of patriotism. He who keeps shop on it, or he who merely uses it as a support to his desk and ledger, or to his manufactory, values it less.”
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)