Mali gold output surges in 2012 despite turmoil

[anansi]

BAMAKO (Reuters) - Gold ore production in Mali jumped 15 percent in 2012 to 50.272 tonnes, from 43.5 in 2011, as miners followed through with expansion plans despite a political crisis and a war, the government said on Thursday.
Output from Mali's southern gold mines is expected to expand further to 57 tonnes this year, said Djibouroula Togola, the technical advisor in charge of production at the West African nation's Mines Ministry.
"Despite the crisis, we exceeded our forecasts in 2012. The industrial mines produced 46.272 tonnes and the artisanal miners produced four tonnes, bringing total output to 50.272 tonnes," he told Reuters.
"In 2013, we expect industrial production of 53 tonnes and artisanal production of four tonnes. So the forecast for 2013 is around 57 tonnes," he said.
The increase comes despite turmoil in the country - Africa's No. 3 gold producer behind South Africa and Ghana - which suffered a coup in March and where French and regional troops are helping the army combat Islamist rebels in the north.
All of the country's gold production is in the south.
Gold companies with mines in Mali - including Randgold Resources, AngloGold Ashanti and Avion Gold - have been publicly playing down the risks of the crisis to production and shipping.
Togola said the construction of a new mine by Canadian miner Robex Resources, expected to produce two tonnes per year over 10 years, had further brightened the outlook.
Malian officials have said the chaos has also left its second economic pillar, cotton, largely untouched.
news.yahoo.com/mali-gold-output-surges-2012-despite-turmoil-140114530--sector.html

[zarahan]

Anansi- what do you have on Malian gold in the world economy, AND Malian prosperity internally
in olden times? Here is my Egyptsearch summary from a while ago. Would like to add to it.

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Mali in the same 1200-1300 time period most likely
exceed numerous kingdoms in contemporary Europe
in terms of wealth, extent of territorial dominion,
and size of its armed forces. And this is before the
Black Death was to begin to ravage Europe. For example,
by the beginning of the 14th century..

"Mali was the source of almost half the Old World's
gold exported from mines in Bambuk, Boure and Galam."
(--Stride, G.T & C. Ifeka. Peoples and Empires of
West Africa: West Africa in History 1000-1800".
Nelson, 1971)


Other historians point to the impact of Malian gold
in economic development of the Mediterranean:

"The most important foundation of Malian power,
however, was control of gold, and it is as a man
of gold that Mansa Musa is still remembered. His story
is quite important to world economic history, since
the supply of gold he commanded played a crucial role
in the economic growth of the Mediterranean."
--Merry E. Wiesner 2002. Discovering the Global Past

and

"It should be remembered here that
during the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries there was an acute shortage of
precious metals in Europe and in the
Muslim lands and that the only really
important source of gold was in the
western Sudan and its hinterland."
--M. Ma³owist (1966). The Social and
Economic Stability of the Western
Sudan in the Middle Ages. Source: Past
and Present, No. 33, (Apr., 1966), pp.
3-15. Published by: Oxford University
Press



"From an examination of Omari's writings, which
come from the same period and are based on Sudanese
accounts, it may be concluded that particularly a
griculture and fruit-gathering, and also, in certain
parts of the country, hunting and the rearing of l
ivestock, assured the Mali peasants of a relatively
prosperous and independent life, satisfying their
needs without much contact with the outside world."

Arab travellers from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries
all tell us that Mali towns Timbuktu, Gao and lesser places -
were in general well supplied with victuals, and there is no
doubt that the towns obtained some of their provisions by trade
with the peasantry. The rural areas had a surplus of agricultural
and animal products which was dispatched for sale in the towns.
Ibn Batoutah and other sources indicate that the western Sudan
even exported a certain amount of millet and rice to the Sahel r
egions, not only to Walata but also farther towards the districts
where rock-salt and copper were exploited for import into the Sudan.

“Jaime Cortesao has drawn historians'
attention to Portuguese sources of the
early fifteenth century, according to
which Portuguese gold currency was at
that time based on importing from
Morocco gold which must have come
from the Sudan. The same author is of
the opinion that it was above all in
Sudanese gold that Morocco paid the
import costs for European and Levantine
goods brought by the Genoese and the
Venetiansl2 a suggestion confirmed by
several Italian documents. It should be
added that Sudanese trade was not the
only way in which Sudanese gold in
large quantities reached Egypt and the
Near East. Sudanese pilgrims, who each
year visited Egypt and the holy places of
Islam in Arabia, brought with them very
considerable quantities of gold to spend
on the journey and on arrival in Cairo,
Mecca and Medina.”

----M. Ma³owist (1966). The Social and
Economic Stability of the Western
Sudan in the Middle Ages. Source: Past
and Present, No. 33, (Apr., 1966), pp.
3-15. Published by: Oxford University
Press.

More on Malian gold and world economy
"The rising European demand for gold, added to
the perennial market in the Islamic states, stimulated
more gold production in the Sudan, to the enormous
fiscal advantage of Mali. In the latest medieval
period overall, West Africa may have been producing
almost two-thirds of the world's gold supply."
-- Ross E. Dunn. 1987. The adventures of Ibn Battuta,
a Muslim traveler of the fourteenth century


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compare to Britain in the same general era:
-------------------

".. there was no English commercial revolution, no development of banks and credit facilities that can be claimed for thirteenth-century Italy. One consequence of this relative backwardness was that in the thirteenth century, an increasing proportion of England's foreign trade came to be in Italian hands.. In a very real sense late thirteenth-century England was being treated as a partially developed economy. Much of its import-export business was handled by foreigners (Gascons and Flemings as well as Italians. Its main exports were aw materials - wool and grain- rather than manufactured goods, There had been, in other words, no industrial revolution."

.. Moreover, despite the claims sometimes made for the cloth-fulling mill, there were no significant advances in industrial technology. Nor was there anything to compare with the highly capitalized development of the Flemish cloth industry in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries."

"..Above all, there was no agricultural revolution.. the technical limitations under which they worked meant no significant increase in yields was possible, neither from sheep in terms of weight of fleece, nor from seed in terms of yield of grain. Though the use of the horse as a draught animal was spreading, this was of marginal importance. ."

".. Thus in many respect England remained a stagnant economy. It can indeed be argued that by comparison with some of its neighbors, especially Flanders and Italy, England was less advanced in the thirteenth century than it had been in the eleventh.. In twelfth and thirteenth-century England, people felt they lived in a country which was economically advanced by comparison with the lands of their Celtic neighbours."

--John Gillingham, Ralph Alan Griffiths. 2002. Medieval Britain: a very short introduction.