DHARAMSHALA, November 17: The Australian environment expert Gabriel Lafitte on Saturday said mining and mass tourism in Tibet are the two industries that are transforming Tibet. Lafitte was speaking before the launch of his book, Spoiling Tibet – China and resource nationalism on the roof of the world.
China poured lots of money into Tibet to build railways, highways and infrastructure but has not successfully made much profit,” said Lafitte.
He also noted that China has a “hunger” for the raw materials. “China has emerged as the world’s factory that is really obvious because China is now consuming minerals and energy from all over the world,” said Lafitte.
“And the very fact that China is now so hungry for the world’s minerals while at the same time intensifying its extraction from Tibet actually means that the big Chinese state owned mining companies are now rapidly intensifying their extraction of mineral from Tibet.”
According to Lafitte, who has spent several years researching on Tibet’s environment and mining in Tibet, China has been extracting roughly 2 million tonnes of Tibetan oil every year for the last 30 years.
“There are, may be, only six million Tibetans on this earth but there are on this planet about a billion human beings who drink Tibet’s water every day and the quality of their water in the upper reaches of the river is really crucially affected by mining in Tibet,” lamented Lafitte.
The book launch and the talk was attended by Tibetan researchers, leaders of Tibetan NGOs and foreigners.
Tenzin Norbu, Head of the Environment and Development desk of the Tibetan government in exile described Lafitte’s book as “unique in a way”. “It explores in a Buddhist way, how in Tibet environment is respected, how the people go to retreat and how the Chinese are getting the excuse to exploit Tibet in the name of modernization and development,” said Norbu.
Gabriel Lafitte is an Australian scholar who conducts researches on Chinese government policies on the Tibetan plateau, and regularly trains new generations of young Tibetan professional environmentalists. Decades of immersion in Tibetan culture, and a dozen of journeys around China, have given him an insider and outsider perspective on two great civilizations in conflict. He is also an academic and development policy consultant to the environment and development desk of the Tibetan government in exile.
