An Indigenous community in Peru is proposing to buy part of a copper concession from MMG Ltd. and turn thousands of artisanal miners working there into formal suppliers to the Chinese-owned company. The Pamputa community is offering to acquire mining rights to an area occupied by about 3,000 artisanal diggers and related workers, according to a document sent to MMG last month and seen by Bloomberg News. Under the proposal, the community would commit to formalizing those operations, while MMG would agree to buy the production.
Community and company representatives are scheduled to meet in Cusco on Friday as part of government-facilitated talks aimed at reaching agreements. MMG did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
High commodity prices and comparatively loose regulations have drawn hundreds of thousands of informal diggers to Peru's metals industry in recent years, fueling disputes over mineral rights. At MMG's Las Bambas copper concessions, artisanal workers threaten to hold up development of a third mining pit, and the company has filed a slew of illegal-mining complaints as it seeks access to the area. In Peru, land ownership is legally separate from the right to mine the minerals beneath it. Pamputa owns the disputed land, where residents have farmed and herded livestock for generations, while MMG holds the state-granted concession to the copper below.
Las Bambas accounts for almost 2% of global mined copper and cost $10 billion to build, the largest single investment in Peru's history. MMG, a unit of China Minmetals Corp., acquired the project from Glencore Plc in 2014, and production began in 2016. MMG estimates artisanal workers have extracted roughly 90,000 metric tons of contained copper from the site. Reinfo, a controversial registry allowing informal miners to operate, is set to expire at the end of 2026 under a plan from President Keiko Fujimori's government.
Source: Bloomberg Markets · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing