[Igor Antunov]

It is sad when a country's primary relevance is based on a singular resource export, but such is life. Note that while China is the majority importer of Guinea bauxite, the resource extractors operating in the country are western multinationals.

Mining companies in Guinea have been permitted to work through the curfews imposed by military coup leaders whose overthrow of President Alpha Conde sparked a fresh rally in aluminium prices.

Guinea will provide about half of China’s imported bauxite this year and prices for bauxite’s end product, aluminium, hit a 10- year high on Monday on fears the coup could disrupt bauxite supplies.

But bauxite industry expert Alan Clark said his communication with people in Guinea combined with vessel tracking data had convinced him that the bauxite industry had not been significantly disrupted by the coup.

“We track all bauxite vessels into and out of Guinea and from what we can ascertain it is business as usual, although it is the wet season right now so there is less activity generally,” he said.

“We can see the bauxite industry in Guinea is still moving. They are barging and transhipping, we can see barges moving, we can see trans-shippers operating, and we can see bulk vessels coming into and out of the region.”

“So we have no reason to believe there is any significant disruption or potential for it in the short term. It looks like business as usual for now.”

https://www.afr.com/companies/mining/mi ... 907-p58pf1

Just more of the same old. Africa is a real basket case.