JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – A champion community to serve as a developmental model for the rest of the mining industry is being sought by a leading member of the Southern African Institute of Mining and Metallurgy (SAIMM).

Veteran SAIMM member Robbie Robinson, in a leading commentary in the SAIMM journal, puts forward the suggestion that a mining cluster that will host an integrated income-generating community of mineworker families be created.

“I am looking for a champion community,” Robinson writes.

Recalling the use of treated mine water at Western Areas mine for the Tavland fruit-orchard scheme two decades ago, he proposes an integrated community of mineworker families, including senior adults, who rely on food- and biofuels-focused small lot farming, plus allied manufacture and services, to generate sustainable incomes.

Robinson envisages farming by automated hydroponic ‘fertigation’ or subsurface irrigation, using effluent as the main water supply, and waste-dump biomass as power-generation fuel.

Preliminary estimates of the income that can be generated are R300 000 a hectare a year.

Although under no illusions that the tortuous road from poverty to prosperity needs many critical paths of planning, Robinson believes that “these concepts could be achievable”, and calls for detailed debate and demonstration.

In the same edition, Royal Bafokeng Nation research and planning executive Dr Susan Cook argues that well-managed royalties and dividends from mineral resources can provide direct benefits to near-mine communities, even while the State collects its share of the mining revenues through taxation.

The large community-based Bafokeng investment company, Royal Bafokeng Holdings, channels revenue from platinum deposits into a social development programme for 150 000 people who live in 29 rural villages.

In February, South Africa’s Investing in African Mining Indaba heard calls for the mining industry to introduce a fresh, new model that simultaneously boosted agriculture and industry.

The approach of simply making a profit from nonrenewable national patrimony is increasingly being seen as counter to the twenty-first-century reality of the interconnected nature of society and its technological advances.

An increasing number see the future as demanding a mining model that clusters economic activities in order to convert costs into cash.