I'm fairly familiar with Peru because I've been in the country many times and have been involved with projects there. There are two aspects that a company has to go through in entering into a developing country. We'll use Peru as a good case.
If you're looking at financing your operation--because an operation can be anywhere from $500 million to billions of dollars in investment--you will probably have to get money from the banks. Most banks are connected to the Equator Principles, which require you to follow International Finance Commission guidelines on development. One of the processes is the requirement for an environmental impact assessment. It gives you the scope of what needs to be looked at in terms of water, air, and land aspects. It determines what your activities will be and how you will ensure that there's no significant environmental impact. Even Peru has that kind of process for the development of an environmental impact assessment.
What's also included is a social impact assessment of the potential social effects and how they are going to be mitigated. What follows is a requirement for an environmental management plan. That involves monitoring and dealing with incidents, correcting those incidents should they come up, and monitoring programs. Those things are required under Peruvian law and as part of the monitoring process for loan agreements. So on the upfront part of any kind of design there is that kind of environmental analysis to determine that there will be no significant environmental impact.
There may be incidents that need to be corrected and resolved. We have incidents in Canada with mines, and we correct and resolve them and help the environment repair itself. A great case study, if you ever want to look at an operation in Peru, is on the Oxfam Australia website. It's on the Tintaya operation, and going from a national operation to private development issues around environment and community development. There's a great video on there that categorizes the whole thing. There are interviews with community members, company members, the government, and NGOs.
It's a great case study that talks about issues around environment and how they were resolved. It's a good example of how dialogue really works to resolve those issues. What's very interesting is that in ten years of that dialogue process, they say they've only fixed 90% of the issues they started out with. So it can take very long in that dialogue process to get to where everybody is finally satisfied with what's been going on.