Tarkwa (W/R), Oct. 3, GNA - Ms Joyce Aryee, Chief Executive Officer of the Ghana Chamber of Mines, has said that in spite of the relatively stable price of gold this year, the mining industry still faces a lot of challenges.

She said the industry has experienced two major set backs in recent times with the most striking of them being the removal of mining companies from the Unified Petroleum Pricing Fund by the National Petroleum Authority.

Ms Aryee said this has increased the price of diesel supplies to the mines.

The other set back, according to her, was a request by the Volta River Authority to mining companies to cut power consumption by 50 percent as part of the current nationwide load shedding exercise. Ms Aryee said companies, which had the capacity to generate power from their own sources have had to do that at excessively high costs, thereby overstretching their bottom line.

She said others who do not have self-generating capacity had no other option than to switch from continuous processing to a batch-processing mode, adding that this has resulted in production losses, which will affect their profitability and royalty payments to government.

Ms Aryee said in all of these, the Chamber has taken a proactive stance to dialogue with government to find ways to address the challenges for the good of the industry and the entire nation. She bemoaned the activities of illegal miners and said their operations have become perennial challenge which the industry has been working to address.

"Whilst it is a multi-faceted problem, illegal mining is largely, a national security issue,=94 she held and reiterated the need for the state to come to the id of mining companies to address it.