Mozambique: Mining giant keeps all its workers on the books

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Mozambique: Mining giant keeps all its workers on the books

3:21 CAT | 09 Oct 2020

File photo: Macauhub

Mozambique’s minister for mineral resources, Max Tonela, said on Friday that mining company Vale would keep all jobs in the country, fulfilling a promise it made shortly after the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“The company’s activities have been reduced due to the retraction of the main markets, mainly European and Indian, but the company’s management has taken decisions to protect employment and there has been no reduction in the workforce,” he stressed.

“From day one, Vale assured us that it would protect jobs. Today it has made that promise again,” he said.

Vale has 3,456 workers in the country, 92% of them Mozambicans.

Max Tonela spoke after a visit on Thursday to Vale in Tete, in the western hinterland of Mozambique, a coal mining area, one of the country’s main export products.

The “cooling” of economic activity in the world, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, forced Vale to halt its activity in June this year, Max Tonela added.

However, he continued, the company is gradually returning to the normal production process in response to the recovery of the world economy.

“We are gradually witnessing a recovery in the markets as well as in Vale’s coal production activity,” he said.

The company plans to increase its annual production capacity to 15 million tonnes of coal from November 2021, he said.

An improvement in production processes in the two coal processing centres is planned, “to allow the company to progressively increase its level of activity to 15 or 18 million tonnes by November 2021,” Tonela said.

The factory can currently produce 12 million tons of coal per year, but has fallen short of that figure: in 2018 it produced 11.5 million tons and in 2019 it produced 8 million tons.

This year the value is expected to fall again, due to Covid-19, but the company expects a recovery to follow, the government stressed.

Mozambique has had 9,639 cases of Covid-19, with 68 dead and 6,911 recovered.

Source: Lusa