In praise of success

This year’s Mineral Exploration Roundup in Vancouver attracted more than 5,000 delegates, underscoring the better times the mining industry is experiencing.

The large attendance and renewed interest are good in themselves, but they also suggest that exploration — as opposed to development or mining — is getting more attention. The Roundup has traditionally been about early-stage exploration, so a busy Roundup may translate to a busier exploration season.

Much has been made of the demand side to the present buoyant commodities market — industrialization and urbanization in China, renewed economic vigour in the Pacific Rim. It’s an established truism, too, that there are few advanced mining projects that could have a significant effect on the market for any one metal. But less has been said about how dry it is farthest upstream.

We’ve been through more than a decade when the “best” projects were the ones with an established resource, and when the money flowed most freely to projects at the development stage. At the same time, the biggest companies — with a few notable exceptions — cut back on their grassroots exploration efforts, or got out of that part of the business entirely.

The result is that there have been few big discoveries; and the price of having few discoveries is twofold. Few discoveries means few advanced projects in the pipeline; it also means venture capital doesn’t feel the same draw toward the big returns a discovery brings.

Perhaps a renewed junior sector can lead the way to some large new finds, ones that will refill both the project pipeline and the well of new financings.

The purple finger

We’ve been warned off general politics, but the events of last Sunday in Iraq are too big to ignore.

Millions of Iraqis came to the polls, standing in long lines to vote in defiance of the threats from Jihadist fanatics and Baathist nationalists to murder voters waiting at the polls, or bearing purple dye — used to make an indelible mark on those who have voted — on their fingers.

At the same time, left-wing friends of tyranny in the Western World came out to protest the election too. They didn’t — couldn’t — offer violence to ordinary voters half a world away; they merely used the occasion as another chance to shout their empty slogans.

What happened next? Election-day violence did kill 44 Iraqis: but 8 million voted, making for a turnout comparable to elections in the developed Western countries. People saw that the threats meant little, and instead held up their fingers as proof that they had not been intimidated. (Given the terrorists’ addiction to grand symbolic gestures, we predict they were not holding back for a big attack next week.)

The terror gangs have been reduced to hoaxes to show their prowess. In one case, they made a video claiming to have shot down a Royal Air Force transport, which had crashed on election day; it was quickly debunked by missile experts. In a second, they claimed to have taken a U.S. soldier captive, and offered as proof a photo of a doll in a combat uniform. (That one was just credible enough to fool the Associated Press until someone looked in a toy catalogue.)

The invasion of Iraq and the violent suppression of their terror may have made the gangs afraid, but the vote by Iraqis has now made them laughable. The purple-stained index fingers are an eloquent digital salute to a gang whose power is draining away while the world watches; and a rebuke to mindless leftists who can’t stand to see the leading Western powers both doing well and doing good.