reopening Panguna copper mine, page-11

"My opinion is that the locals would rather do small scale mining and reap the rewards than have a large dirty conglomerate come in and take the proceeds offshore. They are very patriotic & protective, all of PNG is (to their village & lands). The winners in a small scale mining boom in Bougainville will be the gold buyers."

Interesting comments
Guessing you are talking mining with cheap explosives and hand sorting ore then selling as a concentrate ,, where do the gold buyers fit in the picture though?
Small scale mining has its own inherent problems with poor safety conditions lack of safe tailings disposal and toll treatment with due to no lab test results on ore an inability to monitor if being short changed, guess a Niton tester would be the best use of capital any artisian miners could use.
Anyway good luck to everyone after 20k people got slaughtered last time