PRESTEA-HUNI VALLEY, Ghana, (DT) – At an unlicensed gold mine in Ghana, men in t-shirts, shorts and rubber boots wade through pools of muddy water laced with mercury, pull out rocks with bare hands and operate a rickety sluice as they search for the precious ore.
The ramshackle mine is part of a booming business that is generating livelihoods and informal revenue streams for Ghana’s economy, even as it harms miners’ health, pollutes waterways, destroys forests and cocoa farms, and fuels crime.
“It’s risky but I just want to survive,” said one of the men at the wildcat site visited by Reuters in the Prestea-Huni Valley district in western Ghana.
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The 24-year-old accounting student, who asked not to be named because he was involved in illegal activities, said he had been skipping classes to prospect for gold because he needed the money, having lost his father as a teenager.
There was no professional protective equipment at the mine. Men wore flimsy plastic shopping bags on their heads. One had swimming goggles and another a rice bag covering his torso.
The unlicensed gold mining industry, known in Ghana as “galamsey”, has grown at a breakneck pace this year as global gold prices have risen by almost 30%, enticing new entrants.
Small-scale mines produced 1.2 million ounces of gold in the first seven months of this year, more than in the whole of 2023, according to data from Ghana’s mining sector regulator.
About 40% of Ghana’s total gold output comes from small mines, as opposed to concessions operated by multi-national firms. Some 70-80% of the small mines are unlicensed.
POISONED PROFITS
Martin Ayisi, head of Ghana’s Minerals Commission, the mining industry regulator, said most galamsey gold was smuggled out of the country and was therefore not contributing to national gold export revenues.
For Ayisi, the rise in gold prices is good for Ghana, helping it recover from a severe economic crisis in 2022 that required a $3-billion IMF bailout.
“We should be able to get a lot of money and probably exit the IMF programme earlier,” he said, forecasting national gold export revenues would more than double to $10 billion this year.
But industry experts say the lines between legal mining and galamsey are blurred, and gold from informal mines represents a larger proportion of revenues than the authorities acknowledge.
The dangers of galamsey, however, are not in dispute.
Dozens of miners have been killed in collapsing pits in recent years, according to news reports and human rights groups, while hospitals and health centres report high numbers of early deaths from pulmonary diseases of miners and residents of towns and villages near mines.
These are caused by inhaling dust that contains heavy metals such as lead, as well as poisonous fumes from the mercury and nitric acid the miners use to leach gold out of sediment.
The chemicals are then dumped on the ground or in rivers. Ghana’s water authority says mercury and heavy metals from mining have contaminated about 65% of water sources.
ORGANISED CRIME
Opinion polls suggest galamsey is one of the top five issues for voters ahead of a Dec. 7 general election.
The main candidates to replace outgoing Akufo-Addo as president, Vice President Mahamudu Bawumia and former President John Mahama, have pledged to formalise galamsey, for example by funding a state agency to explore for gold and map areas for locals to mine.
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