Miner appeal for help to ease poverty

Miner appeal for help to ease poverty

MELBOURNE (Reuters): The world's biggest miner, the Rio Tinto group, has appealed for help to ease poverty around two Indonesian mines.

Rio Tinto chief executive Leon Davis said the company was appealing to non-government aid agencies to help address the social fallout of Indonesia's shattered economy.

Rio Tinto has a coal mine and a gold mine in Kalimantan, in Indonesian Borneo, and an interest in the giant Grasberg copper- gold mine in the remote eastern province of Irian Jaya.

"The main focus on Kalimantan has been social," Davis said in a pre-recorded television interview aired in Australia on the Channel Nine network yesterday.

"In the immediate vicinity of both mines there's about 60,000 people who need assistance with food, with agriculture, with health, and we have been focusing on that.

"We could do with a bit of help. We've been talking to some of the NGOs here in Australia and elsewhere to see if we can mount a combined effort to relieve some of the distress there."

Parts of Indonesia's economic infrastructure have been torn apart by a meltdown in the country's currency and a flight of foreign capital out of the country, igniting rapid inflation.

Indonesia's ethnic Chinese merchants, often made a scapegoat for the nation's ills, have closed down shops and many have fled their homes in fear, crippling distribution networks and creating shortages of vital goods in parts of the archipelago.