UAE firm IRH buys majority stake in Congo tin miner Alphamin
IRH, a unit of International Holding Co (IHC.AD), opens new tab, entered into an agreement to buy a 56% stake in Alphamin from Tremont Master Holdings, paying C$0.70 per share or about $367 million, the companies said in a joint statement.
Alphamin owns Bisie tin mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo's eastern region, which is also rich in minerals including tantalum, tungsten and coltan. Alphamin's Bisie mine produces about 6% of global tin supplies annually.
Alphamin's production profile "aligns with our strategy of securing interests in high-quality mining assets," IRH CEO Ali Alrashdi said in the statement.
The UAE firm last year concluded a deal to buy a 51% stake in Zambia's Mopani Copper Mines for $1.1 billion. Since then, IRH has said it is seeking deals for critical minerals in Zambia and Congo.
Major oil producers the UAE and also Saudi Arabia are seeking to diversify their sources of income and secure critical metal supplies from Africa and Latin America to allow them to benefit from the transition to green energy.
Tin is used in electronics, renewable energy, and semiconductors.
Alphamin was earlier this year forced to temporarily halt mining at Bisie as Rwanda-backed rebels M23 made advances in the vicinity of its Bisie mine.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Dining across the divide: ‘Wait a minute, you vote Reform and you read the Guardian?'
Occupation Engineering manager Voting record Generally a small-c conservative, has voted Tory in every election but 2024, when he voted Reform as a protest against the Conservative government. Doesn't see himself voting Reform in 2029 Amuse bouche Buys individual pieces of Lego to make his own creations. For his 30th birthday, his fiancee bought him the makings of a 3ft wingspan Tiger Moth biplane Occupation Retired maths teacher Voting record Labour or Lib Dem – whoever is most likely to beat the Tories Amuse bouche Spent seven years teaching in Africa, first in Kenya, then in Malawi Bernard He was very young, very smartly dressed. I wasn't scruffy, but I didn't have his polish. A nice guy; a bit diffident to start with, but we both were, really. It's a strange situation. Once we got talking, we got on fine. Michael He seemed welcoming, more than warm. Bernard I had buffalo chicken wings, followed by haddock, followed by a fantastic sticky toffee pudding. Perhaps I overdid it a bit. Michael I had pork belly to start, and then a Portuguese beef stew. Bernard We both agreed that we had to get away from fossil fuels, but his solution is nuclear. If there is an accident, they tend to be disastrous accidents – he had all kinds of arguments for why Chornobyl couldn't happen here, but even Sellafield in the early years, leaking radioactive water into the Irish Sea, was awful. Michael We should be pushing hard for nuclear, whereas Bernard leaned heavily into renewables. My reasons are the reliability of nuclear, the compactness. It's unfair to judge nuclear on Chornobyl. The causes of that disaster were largely unqualified people and political interference, rather than science. It was the politicians running it, not the engineers. Bernard The cost of Hinkley Point is immense. The French are building it, aren't they? He thinks the reason why that's happening is because the red tape in this country is so terrible. And what do you do with the waste? You bury it. But you've haven't got rid of it, you've just left it for future generations. Michael My response to the half-life issue, which he raised, is that we take very diffuse radioactive material and concentrate it – so it's not like we're creating this deadly thing; it's a natural element, or minerals rather, that's been concentrated. So it's a long problem but it's not a big problem. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Bernard I think Brexit is a done deal and I'm pretty sure that it won't be reversed any time soon. Although I was furious about it, I do tend to think: what can we do? It's like being really cross there was an earthquake. Michael We voted opposite ways but agreed that it was time to move on. It wouldn't have happened this way were I dictator and in charge of everything, and I'm not particularly happy with the results, but we live in a democracy and you've got to accept compromise. Bernard We both felt there should be more consensus in politics. PMQs is a bit of a joke: it doesn't mean anything – it's like a tennis match. If you can make a select committee work, where people from all political parties manage to meet and agree on things, why can't you make law like that? Michael Towards the end of the evening, he mentioned Wes Streeting's new plan for the NHS. It's nice that it's a 10-year plan and is supported by the shadow health secretary. So that's almost a glimmer of hope against the normal discourse of A says this and B says, 'That's bad because A said it.' If both sides say it's a good thing, then it's probably a good thing. Bernard I certainly had an enjoyable evening. I don't think I made a friend, in so far as he's half my age. I said to him, 'Wait a minute, you vote Reform, and you read the Guardian?' It turned out his fiancee is a teacher and she encouraged him to do it. Michael We walked out of the restaurant together, chatted as we walked down the street. We didn't exchange numbers; I'll never see him again, but I very much enjoyed talking to somebody I'd never normally have crossed paths with. I almost felt guilty about how much I enjoyed it. Additional reporting: Kitty Drake Bernard and Michael ate at The Chapter House in Salisbury. Want to meet someone from across the divide? Find out how to take part
Times
2 hours ago
- Times
Zanzibar spice farms get bitter taste of EU regulations
Spice plants crowded in lush rows are fertilised with coconut husks and manure from local chicken and cows, fed by rainfall in the natural rhythms of the Indian Ocean. If precious clove trees show signs of suffering from bugs or disease, they are treated with lemongrass or quinine. Spices are dried on woven mats, heated by the sun. These techniques, free of mechanical or industrial intervention, have been unchanged across Zanzibar since Omani ruler Seyyid Said bin Sultan introduced cloves to the archipelago two centuries ago. The European Union, however, has deemed these farms not to be organic enough, whatever the average health-conscious consumer and socially-minded buyer may think. A drastic tightening of EU certification rules has dashed the hopes of Zanzibar's struggling spice farmers and is already cutting into livelihoods. 'It's one of the biggest problems,' Ali Nassor Mohamedi, 61, who tends to the village-owned spice farm in Kizimbani, said. 'Our methods are organic by nature, but we can't label spices as organic when we export, and it's one reason prices are low.' Zanzibar's spice farmers have faced troubles for decades, starting with nationalisation in the 1970s under which the islands quickly lost their place to Indonesia as the world's largest source of cloves. Climate change has recently become a worry, with unpredictable weather patterns disrupting the usual rainy seasons. Though cloves remain Zanzibar's largest export, the climate, alongside ageing trees and crop diseases, has pushed down production. But the biggest problems facing farmers like Mohamedi are low prices and global competition. Today, Asia-Pacific consumes the most spices — more than 40 per cent of global production — but those arefound locally in the likes of Indonesia, India and Vietnam. Europe is Zanzibar's critical market, with high profit margins — especially from consumers willing to pay a premium for organic spices. Tanzania exported €173 million in spices as well as coffee, tea, and cocoa to the EU last year. Demanding EU regulation around organic imports has long been tricky for Zanzibar's farmers, but not impossible. There is only one EU organic-certified spice exporter in Zanzibar, a Tanzanian-Swiss social enterprise called Zanj Spice that has grown to represent 512 smallholder farmers since its 2012 founding. The company helps farmers gain EU organic certification and remain compliant, guaranteeing purchases and selling the spices on to Europe. This is already costly, according to Elizabeth Mwangi, the company's operations manager. To certify a single farm costs Zanj Spice $1,000 per year for a three-year conversion period, and the group pays an additional €12,000 annually to keep the farms under its umbrella in compliance through external audits. The financial advantages of selling into the certified organic EU market are stark. Zanj Spice can buy from farmers at around 1.8 times the price of local spice traders who sell into the non-organic market. The EU is not unaware of challenges in Zanzibar, having signed two agreements worth €14 million last December on 'inclusive growth and sustainable development' targeting the region. However, 'EU regulation 2018/848 has changed a lot of things fundamentally,' Mwangi said, referring to rules that went into effect this year for third countries importing into the bloc. 'The law now requires a lot of things that the Zanzibari farmer cannot change. Many new farms will not be certified, and existing certified farms will be sanctioned.' At the heart of the new regime are 'zero residue' rules that ban any contaminants — almost impossible to avoid in Zanzibar, Mwangi said. A farmer washing their hands with soap and later touching spices is detectable contamination, as is the drying of spices in proximity to an open window through which woodsmoke could drift. The rules also require a type of crop rotation that Zanzibar's farms are incapable of and, Mwangi added, was redundant given their use of sustainable agroforestry practices. Zanj Spice has had to sanction 13 of its associated smallholdings for breach of the new rules, halting purchases from those farmers and hitting livelihoods. 'When clients visit our farmers, they fall in love with what they're doing. The consumer is happy with the spices, but now the regulation is quite complex,' Mwangi said. 'It's so frustrating.' The community in Kizimbani, like many others, has increased its focus on tours for holidaymakers interested in the history and practices of spice cultivation. It reduces the traditional trade that has defined the 'spice islands' to an attraction, and makes farmers vulnerable to cyclical travel trends. 'In the last 10 years we have been relying more on tourists. In low season people go hungry,' Mohamedi said. 'Without spice there is no life in Zanzibar.'
The Guardian
9 hours ago
- The Guardian
What will the AI revolution mean for the global south?
I come from Trinidad and Tobago. As a country that was once colonized by the British, I am wary of the ways that inequalities between the global north and global south risk being perpetuated in the digital age. When we consider the lack of inclusion of the global south in discussions about artificial intelligence (AI), I think about how this translates to an eventual lack of economic leverage and geopolitical engagement in this technology that has captivated academics within the industrialised country I reside, the United States. As a scientist, I experienced an early rite of passage into the world of Silicon Valley, the land of techno-utopianism, and the promise of AI as a net positive for all. But, as an academic attending my first academic AI conference in 2019, I began to notice inconsistencies in the audience to whom the promise of AI was directed. AI researchers can often identify consistent choices for locations where such conferences are hosted, and where they are not. NeurIPS, one of the top AI conferences, has highlighted annual issues for obtaining visas for academic attendees and citizens from the African continent. Attending such a prestigious conference in the field grants one the opportunity to gain access to peers in the field, new collaborations and feedback on one's work. I often hear the word 'democratisation' within the AI community, an implication of equity in access, opportunity and merit for contribution regardless of one's country of origin. Associate professor of economics Fadhel Kaboub talks about how 'a lack of vision for oneself results in being a part of someone else's vision', reflecting on how systematically lacking an access to infrastructure results in local trade deficits in economies. As in the time of Nafta's promise of 'free trade', promises of 'AI democratisation' today still exist and benefit mainly countries with access to tech hubs not located in the global south. While the United States and other industrialized countries dominate in access to computational power and research activity, much of the low-paid manual labour involved in labelling data and the global underclass in artificial intelligence still exists in the global south. Much like coffee, cocoa, bauxite and sugar cane are produced in the global south, exported cheaply and sold at a premium in more industrialized countries, over the past few years we have seen influence in AI inextricably tied to energy consumption. Countries that can afford to consume more energy have more leverage in reinforcing power to shape the future direction of AI and what is considered valuable within the AI academic community. In 2019, Mary L Gray and Siddharth Suri published Ghost Work, which exposed the invisible labour of technology today, and at the beginning of my tenure at graduate school, the heavily cited paper Decolonial AI: Decolonial Theory as Sociotechnical Foresight in Artificial Intelligence was published. It has been five years since these seminal works. What would an AI community inspired by the Brics organisation, which united major emerging economies to advocate for themselves in a system dominated by western countries, look like for the global south? I often ask myself how AI has contributed to our legacy, and whose stories it won't tell. Has AI mitigated issues of mistrust and corruption in less-resourced countries? Has it benefited our civic communities or narrowed educational gaps between less-resourced regions? How will it make society better, and whose society will it make better? Who will be included in that future? A historical mistrust can impede adoption by developing countries. Furthermore, many developing countries have weak institutional infrastructures, poor or nonexistent laws and regulatory frameworks for data projection and cybersecurity. Therefore, even with an improved information infrastructure, they are likely to function at a disadvantage in the global information marketplace. A currency is only as good as its perceived global trust. When thinking about the democratization in AI and a vision of what it could be in years to come, AI's survival requires including more perspectives from regions such as the global south. Countries from the global south should work together to build their own markets and have a model of sovereignty for their data and data labour. Economic models often consider a definition of development that includes a measure of improvement in the quality of life of the most marginalized of its people. It is my hope that in the future that will extend to our evaluation of AI. Krystal Maughan is a PhD student at the University of Vermont studying differential privacy and machine learning
