- Regional Conference, September 2012

Na Chairman, your Excellency the Vice President of the Republic of Ghana,distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen. I represent a coalition, whose membership at present includes organized groupsand NGOs working on mining, oil and gas, forestry, public sector accountability,policy advocacy, and environmental issues. These include: the Integrated SocialDevelopment Centre (ISODEC), Friends of the Nation, Centre for Public InterestLaw, Public Agenda, the Trades Union Congress of Ghana, the National CatholicSecretariat, League of Environmental Journalists, NEWENERGY, and WACAM.

At the turn of the millennium, natural resource dependent countries of the worldstood at a threshold that required rethinking of the role of natural resourceexploitation in their economic development. This process was largely influencedby the paradox of plenty, a situation many mineral-endowed countries of thedeveloping world found themselves. I do not need to convince you that the reasonmost resource-rich communities have been in arms in Africa, Asia, Latin Americaand beyond, is that, while so much wealth is generated from extractive activities inthe communities, the ordinary people become ever more impoverished: livelihoodsare lost, environment degraded, and the community's sense of security shattered,often with little or no compensation.