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Barrick CSR Advisory Board member spoke at our recent Sustainability Briefing for Investors

 
July 18, 2018

A number of our leaders participated in the Company’s recent Sustainability Briefing for Investors, highlighting our strategy, sharing our progress, and offering their perspective on this critical aspect of our business.

Here are some highlights of remarks at the event by Robert Fowler, a member of our Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Advisory Board, and a highly distinguished former Canadian diplomat and public servant, who spent 39 years in public service.

[Watch the complete webcast of the event]

Why he agreed to serve on the Advisory Board

Early in my career, I concluded that development was all about jobs and greatly enabled by the kind of investment companies like Barrick can provide. I have not wavered from that belief. Of course, it must be intelligent, and culturally aware investment—based on the imperative of obtaining and maintaining a valid license to operate. It must also be monitored regularly to ensure that it conforms to or exceeds all major standards of business behavior and internationally accepted principles and guidelines. That Barrick so clearly is committed to walking this talk is what drew me to its CSR Advisory Board in the first place.
 

Learning from mine site visits

In the spring, the Advisory Board goes on the road, and it is from these on-the-ground visits—which have included Nevada, the Dominican Republic, Chile, Papua New Guinea, Zambia, and just last month, China—that I have learned the most, and which help me serve more effectively as an advisor to the Company.

So, let me share a few observations gleaned from these site visits. The first example is from our visit to Porgera in 2016, for in every way the Porgera mine seemed to offer the most demanding and daunting challenges from a CSR perspective—from the complex social context in which the mine operates, to its challenging and isolated physical environment.

Part of my role is to challenge the Company on sustainability matters that concern me. Thus, I made no secret that I found the Porgera mine’s riverine [tailings] disposal method highly objectionable, and used our visit as an opportunity to share my concerns directly with mine management.

In doing so, I learned:

First, that the monitoring of the Porgera river system has not detected any significant quantity of cyanide, mercury, or any other dangerous pollutants; and second, that there are no other practicable solutions from an environmental, geological or economic perspective, such as tailings ponds and dams, given that the region is beset with high rainfall, dramatic elevation, numerous and often deadly landslides, and unstable seismic activity, such as the 7.5 magnitude earthquake, which occurred on 26 February this year, killing 160—the epicenter occurring but 88 kilometers from the mine site.

In addition, there’s the ever-vexing issue of what would be the impact of mine closure on the 4,000 employees and on the ever-larger and extremely remote Porgera community, where there are few alternative sources of employment—to say nothing of the impact of the loss of the significant contribution to the GDP of one of the poorer countries in the world.

While I’m certainly no fan of this disposal method, and I will continue to advance the topic with the Company, the trip and my time with management did allow me to come away with a better understanding of the particular circumstances there. And I was encouraged as well to see the Company’s public commitment later that year saying it would avoid this disposal method in future operations.
 

Engaging with Barrick’s strategic partners

Fresh from the Advisory Board’s visit to China a few weeks ago, let me offer a comment about our time with Shandong Gold, Barrick’s partner at Veladero in Argentina, which I saw as a unique opportunity to better understand how one of Barrick’s strategic partners thinks about sustainability, and what that looks like on the ground in China.

Over the two days spent with Shandong Gold, I was struck both by their evident technical excellence, and that these are early days in their knowledge and experience of mining outside of China’s borders. I had the impression that they were aware of China’s buccaneering reputation abroad but [they] gave no indication that they considered such behavior anything but poor business sense, and, further, that it had little to do with them.

Similarly, I had no doubt that their determination to become one of the world’s top gold miners was fully matched by their commitment to be among the best performers across the spectrum of CSR issues, and it is here where I think that the company probably has the most to learn as they go out into the world. That said, I did not harbor any doubt of their appreciation of the imperative of obtaining a valid license to operate—both in China and abroad. All in all, I was inspired by the prospect of what such partnerships could accomplish.
 

Affirming the importance of transparency

Gold mining—any mining—in the remotest parts of the world, or even here in North America, is a complex and challenging business. Expectations of appropriate behavior on the part of mining companies are appropriately high—visibility regarding what they do and don’t do is unprecedented. From my perspective, the maintenance of this transparency is essential, and over six years I have observed Barrick’s unwavering efforts to do so, while adhering to international best practices and acting in a manner which benefits all of the Company’s stakeholders—employees, local communities, host governments, and shareholders alike.

Barrick’s record is not perfect, but I am quite convinced of the strength of their corporate commitment to seek perfection. Helping Barrick to address sustainability issues intelligently, sensitively, transparently, and effectively is what the CSR Advisory Board is all about.