Business
Haiti: Gold Rush – but will it benefit the people?
Eurasian Minerals recently returned to the same hills where so many died, and has been quietly buying up licenses: 53 of them so far. The company now controls exploration or exploitation rights to over one third of Haiti’s north.
Eurasian Minerals – which has tested over 44,000 samples so far – is partnered with the world’s number two gold producer, U.S.-based mining giant Newmont Mining.
Another Canadian company, Majescor, and a small U.S. company, VCS Mining, and their subsidiaries have licenses for tracts totaling over 750 square kilometers.
Altogether, about 15 percent of Haiti’s territory is under license to North American mining firms and their partners.
As Majescor’s Haiti subsidiary said in a recent corporate presentation: Haiti is “the sleeping giant of the Caribbean!”
The giant was “asleep” because Haiti’s minerals have previously been too expensive to extract thanks to the tumult of the past three decades, characterized by brutal coups d’état, and due to local resistance to the mining companies.
But the price of gold has held steady above US$1,500 an ounce for the past year, Haiti hosts a U.N. peacekeeping force of 10,000 that will assure a modicum of security for the companies, and just next door in the Dominican Republic, foreign gold giants say they have found the largest gold reserve in the Americas: 24 million ounces.
