Investment in the exploration and exploitation of coal reserves in Mozambique has amounted to more than €3.8-billion over the past few years. So reported the country’s Mineral Resources Minister, Esperança Bias, in an interview last week with Radio Mozambique in Maputo.

She also reported that the country’s coal production amounted to 4.9-million tons last year, the largest amount so far. The Minister expects this figure to grow dramatically during this decade. “There exist the conditions for the country, by 2020, to annually produce more than 50-million tons of coking coal and thermal coal,” she stated.

“Mozambique is being referred to having the potential to become one of the five biggest coking coal export countries in the world.” Bias added that the government had awarded four coal mining licences to four companies and was in the process of awarding further coal concessions.

Separately, Deputy Mineral Resources Minister Abdul Razak told the newspaper O País that Anglo-Australian mining major Rio Tinto’s Benga coal operation, in Tete prov-ince, should be on the agenda of Mozambique President Armando Guebuza’s upcoming State visit to Australia. Razak affirmed that the government was interested in

Rio Tinto continuing to develop its Benga operation, and that it was willing to continue to create a situation in which mining companies operating in the country could carry out their activities without serious constraints and to ensure the profitability of their operations.

More generally, the Deputy Minister pointed out that his country was very interested in learning from Australia’s experience in managing mineral resources. This was because Australia also mines coal and other resources which also exist (but are not yet mined) in Mozambique. In recent years, he highlighted, many Mozambican technical personnel and students had been sent to Australia, to study or to exchange experiences, with the aim of deepening their knowledge of mining. This, in turn, would allow the African country to maximise the benefits it could obtain from its resources.

Razak also noted that his country was inter-ested in attracting more and more Australian investment into the mining and other sectors of its economy. He also revealed that his depart-ment was still examining the studies which lowered the amount of resources at the Benga project, and which caused Rio Tinto to suffer an impairment of $3-billion.

In her interview, Bias highlighted that one of the priorities of the government was the creation of qualified local technical person-nel. Part of this involved the creation or strengthening of local educational institutions.

This will support another key government priority: job creation. “It is an essential objective that the exploration and exploitation of our natural resources will be a crucial factor in the creation of new direct and indirect jobs, by means of business connections to increase the local content in the provision of services and the supply of goods,” she asserted. In parallel, the government hopes to see the creation of many small and medium-sized enterprises around the natural resources operations, which will also create employment and help to achieve sustainable socioeconomic development for the country.