Mined out in Zambia.

• Author: Servant, Jean-Christophe
• Position: A River of Acid

Peter and Irene, both 30, are engineering graduates of Lusaka university and have been working since 2006 in Chingola, a small copperbelt town in Zambia in southern Africa. The couple are employed by Konkola Copper Mines (KCM), the biggest mining company in a country which earns more than half its gross domestic product from mineral extraction. KCM produces 70% of the country's copper and provides its employees with a decent lifestyle: a net salary of 5 million (m) kwachas ($876) a month, plus shares they can cash in in 2010. They also enjoy professional status in a sector whose 400,000 employees earn an average monthly income of 2m kwachas ($350), while 68% of the population of 11 million live on less than two dollars a day.

Of course Peter and Irene have had to make sacrifices. Irene's job is to look after the chemicals used to treat the copper ore, and in 2007 she had to leave her husband and young child to go on a training course in India. The Indian multinational Vedanta has been the majority shareholder in KCM since 2004. The sale was the latest in a series of privatizations that began in the late 1990s, and in which 257 of Zambia's 280 businesses left the public sector.

Nearly 100,000 people lost their jobs over this period, 40,000 of them from the country's flagship company, Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines (ZCCM), which was carved up into as many pieces as there were buyers. Vedanta got its hands on the biggest slice when it bought up the Chingola mine.

Irene has nothing but happy memories of her time in India. While she was away, Peter had to deal with the sudden rise in price of essential goods, petrol and rent: their three-room flat and kitchen, infested with cockroaches and subject to regular power cuts, now cost them 2m kwachas ($350).

Then, on Christmas Eve 2008, the rent fell to 1.7m kwachas ($298)--in tandem with a record fall in the price of copper, which dropped to $2,817 a ton from more than $8,675 in July. The specter of mine closures re-emerged. It was a glum Christmas for the 20,000 or so permanent employees of the mining sector--three times fewer than the state sector had employed at the end of the 1970s. Employers and employees both had to economize to ride out the approaching financial storm: for workers, so they could afford the new school fees at the start of term on January 12, and for employers, so they could maintain their comfortable profit margins.

A river of acid

Vedanta's Zambian subsidiary declared a turnover of nearly $122m in the final trimester of 2008--almost half what they earned in the previous one. First they reduced their contracts with the mainly South African temping agencies, which had flourished after privatization. Thousands of underpaid and non-unionized workers, who had done the riskiest jobs, were laid off. Vedanta then resorted to other "sacrifices" in order to maintain maximum input (its goal, written in large letters above the entrance to its Zambian complex). Suppliers had to wait a little longer to be paid--some went out of business. Working hours became longer: "four 12-hour days followed by two days off," according to a local member of the largest union in the sector, the Miners Union of Zambia (MUZ). Even Peter, a model employee, says they are being pushed to the limit: "We have to be on call 24 hours a day. If this carries on, there will be more accidents."

"Who benefited when the price of raw materials went up?" asks the economist James Lungu, who teaches at Copperbelt University in Kitwe. "Mining companies and their shareholders. And who is suffering now the price is falling? Miners, their families, and the environment. We are on the verge of a social catastrophe."

It takes 100 tons...