TANA GOLDFIELDS News Reviews Mongolia’s economy is soaring, but at what cost?

TANA GOLDFIELDS News Reviews

Mongolia’s economy is soaring, but at what cost?


“Tradition,” says Javhlan.

He was everywhere in Mongolia: On the metal light poles in the capital city, Ulaanbaatar, amid the chockablock traffic, there were little tourist-friendly posters bearing the radiant, smiling image of Mongolia’s premier folk crooner.


You’d stroll past the Lego store, then past Hugo Boss, right into the chic, moneyed core of a nation that is now mining gold, copper and coal for Chinese consumption, and there he was again. Javhlan is 33. On the posters, his cheeks are ruddy, his eyes aglow with health.


He seems well fed, and serene and bearish and strong somehow, and his costume carries a stately (if affected) grandeur. He is dressed 13th-century style, in a long flowing robe and a pointy helmetlike cap, as though he were just about to hop on a horse and join the old warlord Genghis Khan in battle out on the steppes.


Javhlan’s music matches his getup. It is plaintive and patriotic, and his deep baritone voice resonates, manly and sodden with pathos, over tinkling electronic background beats. In one song, “Promise,” he apologizes to his ancestors for how Mongolia has sold out to the Chinese and ensures the desecration will stop. “The land was given to us in one piece,” he declares, “so we will protect it. Even if God asks for a piece of it, we won’t give any away.”


In Mongolia, I scarcely ever stepped into a taxi bereft of Javhlan tunes. When I tried to bond with one driver by asking if the singer on the radio was in fact Javhlan, he grew wistful and glassy-eyed, telling me that, like Javhlan, he hailed from the western province of Uvs. “Tiim,” he affirmed, “Javhlan.”


When I was in Mongolia, Javhlan was running for a seat in the Mongolian Parliament as a dark-horse third-party candidate. Though he would eventually lose, he campaigned with celebrity flourish, by giving away 100 tons of hay to the good herders of Uvs.


He was earnest with reporters, stressing that it was mining — and its savage effects on the earth — that spurred him into politics. “Foreigners are digging up our land,” he said recently, “and ruining our wintering grazing spots. I had no choice but to run.” He added that he was old-school about child rearing. “My wife and I plan to have 15 kids,” he pronounced. “We are real Mongolians.”


On two separate occasions, I arranged a meeting with Javhlan. But then each time he canceled, last-minute. “Javhlan had to rush to the countryside,” I was told, through his handlers. “It was an emergency.”


It didn’t matter, though, for I already knew that Javhlan was central to a vast social experiment. Mongolia was for centuries made up largely of nomadic herders. Its economy was almost static; in 2011, it achieved a 17.3 percent growth in gross national product. The World Bank has predicted that Mongolia will have one of the planet’s fastest-growing economy over 2013, 2014 and 2015.


The nation’s largest mine, Oyu Tolgoi, which just began production in June, is believed to contain 81 billion pounds of copper and 46 million ounces of gold. Nearly all of it will go to China, and on some Chinese maps now, Mongolia is simply rendered as an Alaska-size Chinese province.


Meanwhile, rural Mongolians, enticed by the promise of a richer Ulaanbaatar, are now moving to the capital city, population 1.2 million, at the rate of 50,000 per year, and planting their round herders’ yerts, called gers in Mongolia, willy-nilly on the city’s fringes. The number of cars in UB, as it’s known in Mongolia, has tripled in the past decade. And still a nomad vibe prevails: The city does not have street addresses.


Locals navigate somewhat as herders do in the desert, studying the slant of the sun as they search for tall buildings. There aren’t even any crosswalks — residents are obliged to dodge the oncoming cars, even if they just forked out 2.8 million tugriks, about $1,700, for a handbag at Louis Vuitton.


Amid all the newness and chaos, Mongolia is clinging hard to its past. Genghis Khan is resurgent here, and universally beloved. There is a new 131-foot-tall statue of him just outside UB, and the memory of his “Nine White Banners” flag, consisting of nine white horsetail plumes, is newly keen. Nine is a lucky number in Mongolia now.


Even the most avant-garde Mongolians are embracing old traditions. My interpreter, a heavy metal singer named Uugii, was letting his tiny son’s black locks grow long, in anticipation of a lavish hair-cutting ceremony on the boy’s third birthday. And everywhere a question looms: What does Mongolia need now, as it endeavors to step into the global fray, without losing its integrity and its soul?


All I really did, wandering about Mongolia, was ask that one question. I came home with a picture of a charming and fractious country, in the form of eight answers scrawled into my notebooks.


Source:http://www.tvinx.com/strategy_and_vision-tana_goldfields_plc_united_kingdom_%7C_quora.news.28800.enhttp://coconutbutterz.edublogs.org/

http://www.tvinx.com/strategy_and_vision-tana_goldfields_plc_united_kingdom_%7C_quora.news.28800.en

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TANA GOLDFIELDS News Reviews Mongolia’s economy is soaring, but at what cost?