Beneficiation report

SIR — Doug Blackmur takes me to task for not adequately reporting on a major research project on mineral value chains and for failing to explain why the private sector is not more active in beneficiation (Reply on beneficiation, Letters, February 16).

He is correct that I was involved in the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa’s appointment of specialists to collect data from private enterprises, but it was not only for SA — it was in nine African countries, including SA. The results were published in the Economic Report on Africa 2013, Making the Most of Africa’s Commodities.

The report notes that many constraints to improving economic performance in Africa cannot be overcome by market forces alone and highlights the necessity of developing linkages across economies and regions. It showed that local value addition was limited and recommended strategic and systematic industrial policies on a country-specific basis.

For linkage development to happen, governments need to be involved to build roads, railways and ports, among many other elements, such as investment in technologies, research and skills.

In short, the report concluded that if African governments want to speed up and deepen value addition of local production linkages to the commodity sector and embark on commoditybased industrialisation, they need to work with the private sector.

In SA, we have the additional problem of monopolies in the mining sector. At times, they imported components instead of using local products and they wanted no part of beneficiation in manufacturing. Further, by charging import parity prices, that is international prices, to local manufacturers, they stifled this sector. Beneficiation is only a bad policy if input prices are prohibitive and physical infrastructure problematic.

Prof Ben Turok Director, Institute for African Alternatives