“Bolivia has all the raw materials necessary to be a highly industrialized country. In that sense, the president (Luis Arce) is implementing several lines of work, one of them is the implementation of industries,” he stated this Wednesday in an interview with the state channel Bolivia Tv.
According to Siles, the national government’s import substitution industrialization policy “is the right path and this economic methodology has already been proven in other countries.”
He stressed that most nations with developed economies today implemented industrialization policies without having the raw materials.
According to the vice minister, through the productive virtues of each region of the country, the Government was oriented in the direction of developing local economies with the national, state, private, cooperative and community economies.
“Industries are being guaranteed for food and productive sovereignty,” commented Siles, “but industries are also generated for inputs for the same private industries and for public industries.”
He added in this regard that the aim is to generate a “broad-based economy, not just put all resources into hydrocarbons.”
The Government of President Arce guarantees an injection of 29 billion bolivianos (more than four billion dollars), aimed at the construction and start-up of some 150 industrial plants throughout the national territory.
In this way, an attempt is made to take advantage of the productive potential of each region and boost the country’s economy.
The Ministry of Productive Development and Plural Economy is in charge of 63 industrial plants of those 150 planned, with an investment of 11,274 million bolivianos (more than 1,600 million in US currency), according to official reports.
Siles emphasized that in the near future this entire program will generate 62 thousand direct and indirect jobs.
Among Bolivia’s natural resources, the 23 million tons of lithium quantified and in the process of international certification stand out, which places the country as the owner of the world’s largest reserve of this key metal in the global energy transition towards electromobility.
In addition to lithium and other evaporites (mineralogical substances present in the salt flats and salt lagoons), the Andean-Amazonian country is rich in rare earths and other raw materials necessary for the production of a variety of foods in its different ecological zones, which are also raw material for industrialization.
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