More to Be Told in Mining Story

For the last couple of years, Bre-X Minerals has been trying to convince experts and investors that huge gold deposits lie in the center of Borneo at the site called Busang. With estimates of the value of the Busang site approaching $24 billion, stockbrokers and investors helped push the Bre-X stock from pennies in 1993 to more than $200 last year before a 10-for-1 stock split.

Now that the news that it was all a hoax has surfaced, Bre-X stock appears worthless. Although this is, indeed, newsworthy and fascinating, there is much more to the story than is being told.

I suspect that anybody buying a small mining company’s stock on the hopes that it will produce fantastic returns is greed-motivated or an extreme risk taker--or both. Another story that begs to be told is about the destruction and devastation of the rain forest and the people who live there--all for the greed of making large sums of money. Last summer my wife and I were in central Borneo and saw the effects of gold mining in the region. Polluted by mercury, the rivers no longer can support fish, and what fish survive are unfit for human consumption. The native people, unable to fish to eat, must now slash and burn exotic and rare trees to make way for land to be farmed.

These new farmers, not knowing how to farm efficiently, must cut more trees to obtain more farmland, resort to cutting trees for money or, worse, move from their ancestral homeland.

Maybe it’s stories like these that could bring home the point that business does have an effect on our lives and our environment.

KEVIN S. REID

Los Angeles