South Africa Mine Firms Unite to Fight AIDS Scourge

South African mining firms are looking at a unified approach to tackling AIDS -- one of their biggest unresolved challenges as HIV infection rates creep higher. Mining is a vital foreign exchange earner for South Africa, but about 20 percent of the industry's 400,000 workers are HIV-positive. Its second-largest gold miner, Gold Fields Ltd., reckons the disease will add between $4 and $10 an ounce to production at its mines, where an estimated 26.5 percent of its 50,000 workers are infected. The mining sector makes up about 40 percent of South Africa's exports. At the end of the 1990s, it contributed about 10 percent to the country's GDP.

The labor consultancy NMG-Levy reported that some 30 percent of South Africa's workforce will be HIV-positive in 2005. By 2010, one million South Africans will be sick with AIDS and six million will have died of AIDS-related illnesses. "[South African companies] previously saw it as primarily a human resource issue. Now they acknowledge that it is the single most important strategic issue facing South Africans," said Andre Levy, NMG-Levy's director.

Anglo American Plc recently halted its feasibility study on providing antiretrovirals to its workers and will approach the Chamber of Mines (COM), an industrial association, for an industry-wide study. The chamber's health policy committee will propose a feasibility study to distribute drugs to about 80,000 infected miners, and a decision to go ahead with the study could be made in a month, said Fazel Randera, a medical advisor for COM. The study would have to be backed by the trade unions and government to be implemented, he said.

SG Securities analyst Nick Goodwin said, "Gold mines are making a lot of money from the gold price and the weak rand," adding that if the mining companies had to foot the bill, "it's no big deal." National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) spokesperson Moferefere Lekorotsoana said the industry "could have dealt effectively with AIDS years ago and put in more research and resources." Nevertheless, he said the union welcomed the unified industry approach.

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