Natural Resources
The country has rich but largely unexploited natural resources in the form of diamonds, gold, uranium, and other minerals. Diamonds constitute the most important export of the CAR, frequently accounting for 40-55% of export revenues, but an estimated 30-50% of the diamonds produced each year leave the country clandestinely. There may be petroleum deposits along the country's northern border with Chad (Two billion barrels of oil are present in private estimates). Diamonds are the only of these mineral resources currently being developed; reported sales of largely uncut diamonds make up close to 60% of the CAR's export earnings. Industry contributes less than 20% of the country's GDP, with artesian diamond mining, breweries, and sawmills making up the bulk of the sector. Services currently account for 25% of GDP, largely because of the oversized government bureaucracy and high transportation costs arising from the country's landlocked position.
Read more about this topic: Economy Of Central African Republic
Famous quotes containing the words natural and/or resources:
“Profundity easily turns into dullness and astuteness deteriorates into wit. Be guided by natural common sense and it will accommodate great and small.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“Everywhere we are told that our human resources are all to be used, that our civilization itself means the uses of everything it has—the inventions, the histories, every scrap of fact. But there is one kind of knowledge—infinitely precious, time- resistant more than monuments, here to be passed between the generations in any way it may be: never to be used. And that is poetry.”
—Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980)