Calling for the “repeal without delay” of the Human Development Fund law, S.Ganbaatar, President of the Confederation of Mongolian Trade Unions (CMTU), has expressed the hope that Parliament will realize the folly of the present plans to invest mining revenues in international securities to get easy returns. “This is gambling, even if legitimized, and cannot be national policy, particularly when we do not have a single expert in our country who really knows about investing and trading in securities,” he has said in The Mongolian Mining Journal. He also noted the “total silence about apportioning responsibility for losses through unwise investments in the international market”.

Using the mining revenue to give each citizen MNT70,000 to celebrate the Lunar New Year was “a real waste”, he said, recalling the saying “Don’t give fish to the poor; instead, teach them how to fish.”  Hand-outs “destroy our people’s ambition to live independent lives by encouraging them to believe that it is possible to live without doing anything”, he said, fearing that this sort of populism “will gradually kill national initiative, a disastrous prospect”.

Calling for a government policy on using mining revenues to send young people abroad to train as mining professionals, Ganbaatar said, “If we cannot provide our own manpower, naturally technicians and engineers from other countries will come here to work in large mining projects, while our young people will have only unskilled and menial jobs.”  He clarified that his emphasis on education and training does not mean the Government will withdraw support from the really poor, but “skilled and educated people not only support themselves but also create jobs for others”, he said.