An Indigenous community in Peru is proposing to buy part of a copper concession from MMG Ltd. and turn thousands of artisanal miners working there into formal suppliers to the Chinese-owned company, according to Bloomberg News. The proposal would be an unconventional solution to a longstanding dispute over the Las Bambas mine. The Pamputa community is offering to acquire mining rights to an area occupied by about 3,000 artisanal diggers and related workers, according to a document sent to MMG last month and seen by Bloomberg News.
Under the proposal, the community would commit to formalizing those operations, while MMG would agree to buy the resulting production. MMG did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Community and company representatives are scheduled to meet in Cusco on Friday to discuss the proposal.
The talks are being facilitated by the government and aim to reach agreements. High commodity prices and comparatively loose regulations have drawn hundreds of thousands of informal miners to Peru's metals industry in recent years, fueling disputes over mineral rights. Large projects owned by MMG and other companies, such as Southern Copper Corp., have been affected, at a time when the global mining industry is struggling to meet copper demand growth driven by data centers and power-grid expansion.
In MMG's case, artisanal workers operating on its Las Bambas copper concessions threaten to hold up the development of a third mining pit. The company has filed a series of illegal-mining complaints against the workers as it seeks access to the area. In Peru, the world's third-largest copper producer, land ownership is legally separate from the right to mine the minerals beneath it.
In the disputed Las Bambas case, Pamputa owns the land, where residents have farmed and herded livestock for generations, while MMG holds the state-granted concession to exploit the copper below. The dispute over access to the land has complicated MMG's efforts to develop the pit. According to Bloomberg News, Las Bambas accounts for almost 2% of global mined copper, cost $10 billion to build and is the largest single investment in Peru's history.
MMG, a unit of China Minmetals Corp., acquired the project from Glencore Plc in 2014, and production began in 2016. MMG estimates that artisanal workers have extracted roughly 90,000 metric tons of contained copper from the site. Ore extracted by the informal miners at their quarry, known as Apu Chunta, is trucked more than 400 miles to processing plants.
The resulting concentrate is sold to traders including Trafigura Group, IXM SA and Glencore, according to the community's document. Informal miners in Peru can operate through a controversial registry known as Reinfo, which industry leaders say has been used to shield illegal activity. Created about a decade ago as a temporary mechanism allowing small-scale miners to keep operating while they formalized, Reinfo has been repeatedly extended.
President Keiko Fujimori's government is seeking to let Reinfo expire at the end of 2026 and replace it with a system giving registered informal miners two years to formalize. Source: Bloomberg News, via Mining.com, October 16, 2026.
Source: mining.com