WORKING GROUP 4 
FRANGIS 
201 
Particularly in the developing countries, pre-investment surveys are required 
to provide the facts which form a sound basis for economic development. Such 
preliminary investigations are essential to determine the practicability of 
projects, the scale of investment required, and an assessment of the probable 
benefits such projects can bring to the emerging nations. 
Naturally, countries in different stages of development have different re 
quirements; e.g. Mexico, Guatemala, India, Ghana, Sudan. But all need 
accurate surveys as a basis for development planning, which includes com 
munications development; natural resources conservation - forests, soil, water; 
natural resources utilisation - timber, mineral deposits, land and irrigation; 
also for the associated engineering works of soil and water conservation and 
communications development. Country-wide surveys are desirable, but the 
high cost of covering large areas usually means that specific projects showing 
short term benefits must be undertaken first. 
Frequently, relatively little consideration is given to the important question 
of the economic value of pre-investment surveys, both their intrinsic value in 
paving the way for investment, and their actual cost when critically examined 
in relation to future development proposals. 
Various figures are often quoted for the cost of resource appraisals. These 
usually vary from 2 percent to 5 percent of the estimated capital investment 
involved in implementing a promising project. What I wish to bring to your 
attention today are the problems involved in justifying pre-investment surveys. 
It is obvious to all of you that in most cases nowadays the use of aerial survey 
techniques has substantially facilitated obtaining the necessary information on 
natural resources, compared with older and more traditional methods. Examples 
are use of aerial photographs in forest inventory, which has substantially 
reduced the amount of routine timber cruising involved, and the use of photo 
interpretation techniques to delineate soil series which has, again, cut down very 
substantially the amount of field sampling required to carry out soil surveys. 
But we need to go further than this. We should critically examine the cost 
and efficiency of present techniques. This is not to say that they are inefficient, 
but there have been recent developments, or perhaps the word refinements 
would be a better way of describing them, which still further increase the 
efficiency and reduce the cost of carrying out resource appraisals. 
All pre-investment surveys or resource appraisals involve a study of: 
Raw material supplies - whether these be forest, soil or mineral resources. 
Markets - home and export, with a forecast of future demand trends. 
Capital investment requirements - including adequate working capital to start 
operation of an enterprise. 
Communications - both for raw materials and for transport of the finished products. 
Other factors - labour, water, power supplies, etc. 
Of prime importance, and relevance to this symposium, is the first - the 
raw material supplies. Without these there can be no development, but to assess 
them is often difficult, costly, and time consuming. Surveys of communications