I am concerned about the scramble for Africa's resources by global multinational corporations whose only interest is in their profit margins. Their activities result in social and environmental destruction and often in brutal conflicts and resource wars.

African governments are often co-opted and corrupted by these global multinational corporations under the smokescreen of 'foreign investment.' These corporations keep costs to a bare minimum in order to maximise profits and therefore have little demonstrated concern for the environment, people and cultures they encounter along the way. The limit expenses these corporations externalise as much of their costs as they can get away with to local communities too poor to bear such costs.

His Royal Highness Chief Musele and the Musele Task Team have been legally resisting FQM for more than three years now. Your government has made the permission to mining conditional yet FQM has ignored every single condition set by the Zambian Environmental Management Agency (ZEMA), which agency is under the misapprehension that the Sentinel Project is still in exploratory phase, when infect the mine is well advanced into ramp-up and construction phases.

30 000 people will lose their land, their ability to farm and sustain themselves. FQM will create only 6 000 jobs, and most of this will go to migrant mine workers. 

The people of the Musele Kingdom will be left destitute, one of the few remaining indigenous forests in Zambia will be destroyed. The rivers are already being dammed up by FQM and the access of communities to water and fish is being cut of. Like elsewhere in Zambia the mining and processing of copper will lead to acid mine drainage and to radio active waste pollluting the ground and surface water. Smelting will lead to acid rain due to carbon and sulphur dioxide emmissions, and respiratory diseases will escalate. 

Local women, deprived of land to cultivate to feed their families will resort to sex work and sexually transmitted diseases and HIV/AIDs will spiral out of control. The Zambian copper belt is already an environmental, health and social mess, don not allow yet another part of Zambia to follow the same route. 

Water will become one of the most important global resources on the planet, North Western Zambia is water rich, one drop of clean water is far more valuable than a tonne of uranium or copper.

Please direct your correspondence in protest to your nearest Zambian Embassy, follow the link below http://www.zambiaembassy.org/index.php?page=contact-us