Mongolia is five times as great Italy but only 2.75 million inhabitants, of which 40% are concentrated in the capital Ulan Bator. More than a third of the population lives below the poverty line 101,600 Tugrik (60 €) per month despite last year there has been a growth of 8% twenty years after the collapse of communism, the country is at a new point turning.
Mongolia, today is the least densely populated country in the world, with four people per square mile. It extends between the boundless prairies, steppe, subarctic evergreen forests, wetlands, alpine tundra, mountain and desert. In this context they live, yaks, goats, deer, camels, wolves, bears, marmots, squirrels, hawks, eagles and cranes, and especially some of the last nomadic people with traditional wild horses.
Over the past decade a combination of economic and climatic disasters have forced many Mongolians from rural areas to seek opportunities in the capital Ulan Bator, and the city has grown enormously, from 300,000 to a million today.
The economic meltdown is certainly derivative of the global economic crisis that has led to a drastic reduction in demand cashmere radically reducing the price of fine wool, the primary source of survival, and once again putting a blow to the Mongolian people .
The climate catastrophe instead was given last winter that was terrible for Mongolia, with temperatures about 50 degrees below zero and snow which covered the area by putting their herds to starvation and nearly ten thousand families of nomadic pastoralists . About ten million cattle, sheep, goats, horses, yaks and camels have died, one fifth of the country's total. The damage is estimated at 520 billion Tugrik, nearly 300 million euro.
A survey has shown that these tragedies have resulted in 50% of citizens to be well prepared to accept the new opportunities given by the mining investment. These undoubtedly represent the future change epoch, given by largest exploration project in the area of \u200b\u200bmining Oyu Tolgoi in southern Mongolia, with huge mineral deposits, the largest of the entire state of Florida. Under the Mongolian soil, there are gold, copper, uranium, coal and rare earth just waiting to be extracted. All this is developed through a joint venture between a Canadian company called Ivanhoe and the Government of Mongolia, with significant funding also provided by the Chilean mining giant Rio Tinto. Together, they plan to invest 5 billion U.S. dollars in transactions over the next few years, making Oyu Tolgoi's largest foreign investment in the history of Mongolia.
The Government of Mongolia may well be regarded as pro-mining and during the expected life of the mine 65 years, revenues are expected to become one third of gross domestic product of Mongolia . The mining boom undoubtedly triple or quadruple the size of the Mongolian economy over the next five years, although the relationship between the country's vast natural resources and wealth of its people has yet to be determined.
Source: (Guardian)
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