I could not help noticing the comments concerning mining costs...

I could not help noticing the comments concerning mining costs in such places as Mali. I worked for a number of years at a couple of gold mines in Ghana - probably not dissimilar to Mali except not as isolated and everyone spoke English.

From looking at the area where the exploration is taking place I assume access is through Senegal (if this country is reasonably peaceful at present) as travel through Ghana and Burkina Faso would be seriously long and travel through Cote D'Ivoire and surrounding countries apart from Ghana would not be safe at present.

The concept of cheap labour is a bit of a myth in these areas. The actual cash wages might be very low but in most cases you have to train the people, feed them, house them and look after their welfare in every possible way. Generally all supervisory staff have to be expatriate and their salaries and costs would be between double and treble the equivalent in Australia. Virtually all maintenance staff have to be expatriate as there are no locals with any sort of training in maintenance of any sort of machinery. For most other jobs it would take 4-6 locals to do the work normally done by one expatriate.

All other costs are the equivalent of here or greater. The freight costs would be substantial. Most machinery and supplies would have to be road-freighted as airfreight would be prohibitive and from what I can see the distance is something like 700km + and the roads are generally of a qualilty that would not permit travel at more than 60km/hour. I would assume virtually all food, construction materials, etc. would have to imported into the country.

All of this means that the grades have to be seriously good to make these places viable.

In Ghana we could profitably mine surface oxidised ore at 1.1gms/tonne, but on underground mining it had to be at least 5-6 gms/tonne because it was generally of a refractory nature in harder rock that made mining more difficult, crushing more expensive and time-consuming and the refining process more expensive with lower recovery levels.

Just a few thoughts to put a bit of perspective on things.