Great Basin Gold Ltd. (fka GBGLF)

[ditchman999]

Van Eck's Foster interview



HAI: Let’s shift to South Africa. There’s talk of platinum mines closing. It seems sort of contrarian to the demand situation. Is South Africa becoming more and more of a question mark regarding figuring out what’s going on, not just with platinum, but precious metals in general?

Foster: No, I don’t think it’s too much of a question mark. The situation for the mining business in South Africa is definitely deteriorating. You have various unions that are causing wages to rise. It’s very, very labor-intensive mining that goes on in South Africa. So these companies are really affected negatively by large wage increases.

We have competing unions that are starting to drive up wages fairly dramatically. You’ve got difficult mining conditions with the narrow, deep underground mining that you find in South Africa. It’s just become a very difficult place to run a mining business. That’s the trend we see in South Africa, and we don’t see an end to it in the foreseeable future