Mining in Guinea Between Obstacles and Opportunities for Sustainable and Integrated Development?

In this subject, I will address the main challenges facing the development of extractive industries in Guinea by placing them within the framework of the country's economic structures and taking into account the related social and environmental challenges. The measure of the benefits of mining in a country is measured by the yardstick of the integration capacity of the country's economic structures in the face of financial flows from private and parastatal actors. The analysis of the concepts of "inter-industrial relationship" is at the heart of the country's development strategies thanks to the revenues from the extractive industries. Beyond the classic reflection on tax obligations, the structuring repercussions of mining industries are analyzed from a perspective of political economy and social and environmental resilience. Social and environmental obligations are both standards enshrined in the main codes, but also represent sociological practices whose operating logic often eludes the various actors. In the BOKE region, the multiplicity of mining actors represents both an opportunity to capture income essential to the development of social and economic infrastructure, but also constitutes a factor that burdens endogenous development potential. The local economy historically based on the primary agro-pastoral sector is doubly threatened by the rush towards all-out extractivism. The extension of the perimeter of mining operations in the region to nearly 62% of the total area of Boké restricts the availability of useful agricultural land, redirects the human resources active in the mining field to the detriment of the agricultural field. 1 Constraints on space and livelihood resources limit the ability of communities to drive their own development. The weakness of local economic structures reduces the volume of possibilities for absorbing financial flows invested in mining projects. So many constraints which push the reflection to the installation of strategies of development of inter-industrial links between the mining sector and the fields of activity which would survive the mine, with limited impacts on the natural resources.