Resources
Gabon depended on timber and manganese until oil was discovered offshore in the early 1970s. The oil sector now accounts for 50% of GDP and 80% of exports. Oil production is now declining from its peak of 370,000 barrels per day (59,000 m3/d) in 1997. The 1998 fall-off in oil prices had a negative impact on government revenues and the economy. Gabon public expenditures from the years of significant oil revenues have not been spent well.
The government has recently announced it will reassess exactly how much iron ore the Belinga site contains before awarding the concession to a mining company, most likely to be China’s CMEC, who temporarily secured the rights to the ore in 2007.
Read more about this topic: Economy Of Gabon
Famous quotes containing the word resources:
“Hearing, seeing and understanding each other, humanity from one end of the earth to the other now lives simultaneously, omnipresent like a god thanks to its own creative ability. And, thanks to its victory over space and time, it would now be splendidly united for all time, if it were not confused again and again by that fatal delusion which causes humankind to keep on destroying this grandiose unity and to destroy itself with the same resources which gave it power over the elements.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)
“The poor tread lightest on the earth. The higher our income, the more resources we control and the more havoc we wreak.”
—Paul Harrison (b. 1936)
“Everywhere we are told that our human resources are all to be used, that our civilization itself means the uses of everything it has—the inventions, the histories, every scrap of fact. But there is one kind of knowledge—infinitely precious, time- resistant more than monuments, here to be passed between the generations in any way it may be: never to be used. And that is poetry.”
—Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980)