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| SOCIAL AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT |
Assembly with people
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The salt flats region is arid, cold and sparsely populated. It is home to indigenous rural communities whose traditional occupations are livestock farming, salt trading and growing quinua under precarious conditions. Since the National Association of Quinua Producers, ANAPQUI, was set up in the 1980s, there has been a considerable improvement in both prices and production.
The region has seen a huge growth in tourism in the last few years, but the tour operators in the city benefit from it much more than the rural communities. Finally, the rise in world mineral prices has led to an upturn in mining.
Although the project to industrialize the evaporite deposits is a national undertaking, it must include measures to improve the living conditions of local people and their communities.
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The aim is to ensure that everyone in the region’s communities sees the industrialization project as belonging to them, as well as becoming the mainstay of the project by working in the industry.
Right from the start, the project has been proposed as a public, social initiative. The priority will be to re-invest in further projects to industrialize other natural resources in the region in the future, using the tax revenue from this project and re-investing profits.
Other priorities are to improve roads and provide local communities with electricity, drinking water, communications infrastructure, health services, etc. This will enable the communities to scale up their productive economic activities such as growing quinua, raising camelid livestock, tourism and mining.
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Seminar in Uyuni
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Other priorities are to improve roads and provide local communities with electricity, drinking water, communications infrastructure, health services, etc. This will enable the communities to scale up their productive economic activities such as growing quinua, raising camelid livestock, tourism and mining.
Some of the social initiatives that the project will support in its first phase are:
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Support for education and science, by promoting the creation of a centre for research and training on evaporite resources.
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Studies on how to improve roads by using bischofite, a by-product of the brine refining process.
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Implementation of a fertilization programme to address the fall in quinua production due to the lack of potassium and magnesium in the soil.
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Support for Río Grande community organizations and institutions to take forward boron industrialization projects.
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Support for the San José de Quetena Cooperative to improve the conditions in which it produces trona from the Collpa Laguna lake; once refined, this trona will be a valuable input for the pilot plant.
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