Can nations ever get artisanal gold mining right? (2024)

Artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) is a pillar of stability and opportunity for at least 16 million people worldwide, particularly in rural, impoverished communities. But with these pros also come cons. Given the serious contamination and environmental degradation associated with it, nations around the world are pushing for more sustainable laws and regulations. The question remains for policymakers, however: Can policymakers ever get it right?

Several studies have demonstrated the harmful effects of ASGM on communities and the environment. One of the greatest problems is the use of mercury to separate gold from the ore, with the waste then released into the environment, leading to air, soil and water pollution that threatens biodiversity and human health. Another issue is deforestation without a rehabilitation process, which legal mines are often required to have.

“There are a lot of illegal mining activities in the small-scale mining space that are creating a lot of environmental issues, such as pollution of river bodies,” Philip Bawah, a member of the Ghana National Association of Small-Scale Miners (GNASSM), told Mongabay.

The challenge, he said, is proper regulation and government assistance to turn these operations into legal businesses that follow environmental protocols. “There are a lot of lapses from the authorities concerned,” Bawah told Mongabay.

Nations around the world are keen to find ways to make mining more sustainable, given that so many people depend on it for income and security. In fragile and conflict-affected areas, a regulated ASGM sector can offer marginalized youth an alternative to organized crime and provide local governments with revenue for development.

The 2013 U.N. Minamata Convention on Mercury, which seeks to regulate and eradicate mercury use, is one attempt by the international community to deal with the issue. More than 140 countries signed the convention, including Colombia and Ghana, two hotspots for small-scale mining. Though, the actual path to responsible mining is still unpaved, and the convention allows the use of mercury in ASGM. At this stage, there is still no nontoxic alternative to viably replace mercury, and a total ban on the compound would involve depriving rural communities of this livelihood.

At the end of the day, gold mining per se is not sustainable, as it involves extraction of finite resources, Richard Gutierrez, program management officer for national reporting and effectiveness evaluation of the Minamata Convention Secretariat, told Mongabay. “Once gold is taken out of the ground, it does not replenish itself.”

It’s a complex development issue, and banning the activity altogether would have a strong economic and social impact on areas with communities that depend solely on this activity, Gutierrez and mining experts said.

“A gradual economic conversion process would be required, accompanied by viable alternatives to match the profits generated by mining activity,” said Franco Gómez, a chemical engineer at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia.

Considerations for a mercury alternative

For ASGM to be responsible and environmentally sound, Gutierrez said there needs to be compliance with and enforcement of national regulations; no child labor; and respect for women, Indigenous peoples and local communities. And on this aspect, he remained unequivocal: There has to be, at a minimum, no mercury use.

In one recent paper, researchers who studied the impacts of ASGM in the Peasant Reserve Zone of the Cimitarra River Valley in Colombia’s Bolívar department, where around 6,000 inhabitants are directly or indirectly linked to mining activities, found mercury pollution in the area’s soil and water bodies. Mercury was also discovered in aquatic plants — which is an important source of food for fish, which are then consumed by humans. In addition, as communities use river water for irrigation, the metal makes its way into maize, cassava, banana and rice crops.

Mercury also causes widespread damage to ecosystems far away from the original mining site, as its airborne compounds can travel thousands of miles in the atmosphere before it is eventually deposited back to the Earth through precipitation. The health impacts of mercury contamination include damage to the central nervous system, kidney failure and gastrointestinal damage. In the Okapi Wildlife Reserve in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), mining has destroyed key habitats for a wide range of species, including the chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) and bongo (Tragelaphus eurycerus).

Although some mercury-free alternative technologies have been explored in different parts of the world with some success rates in terms of gold recovery — such as cyanide, which is frequently used in large-scale mining operations, and the enhanced gravity concentration method — another challenge is how to increase the acceptance of these mercury-free alternatives by ASGM miners.

“These alternatives must be proven to offer more advantages and added value to miners than mercury,” Richard Kumah, a policy analyst and research consultant at Queen’s University in Canada, told Mongabay.

Kumah, who studies ASGM in Ghana, said many miners (also known as galamsey) prefer mercury because it is cheaper, more convenient and easier to use, and its application requires little or no education. “Mercy-free alternatives being introduced must be able to consider these socioeconomic dimensions and to demonstrate to miners the added value of using such cleaner alternatives.”

Cyanide has been proven to work, but without the implementation and enforcement of rigorous safeguards, which are often costly, the use of toxic chemical comes with its own problems, including environmental damage and water contamination. As ASGM operations are typically undercapitalized and lack formal safety training and environmental management policies, including water and waste management plans, experts at planetGOLD warn that the risks can easily be compounded and dispersed.

“Artisanal and small-scale gold miners generally do not have the kind of resources that large-scale mining has,” Gutierrez said.

“We’re seeing [small-scale] miners transition into using cyanide instead of mercury to process gold, and that poses its own unique challenges, similar to what industrial gold mining is facing. Small-scale miners using cyanide need to manage their mining waste properly. With little capital, miners resort to dumping cyanide contaminated mine tailings into the nearest water body the operation is situated in. When this happens, you have issues with fish kills and impacts to communities living downstream.”

The enhanced gravity concentration process, which relies on the high density of gold relative to other minerals, has seen significant success rates in the northern Philippines. In Kalinga province, where small-scale mining is controlled by the Banao Bodong Association, miners from the Banao tribe wash the ore on a series of angled platforms to concentrate the coarse gold. Instead of using mercury for amalgamation as done in the past, the sediment is washed down over a carpet-lined sluice to capture finer gold. The resulting concentrate is then panned by hand.

Several factors have allowed these miners to accept and transition to mercury-free methods, including intensive education from the Filipino environment group BAN Toxics about the negative health and environmental impacts of mercury in the community and how to use mercury-free techniques. The miners also found that these methods yielded more gold than the mercury-based techniques. Importantly, at the time of this transition, the local price of mercury had skyrocketed, which made mercury-free methods more appealing to miners.

However, substituting mercury with gravity concentration requires continuous support, guidance and some capital, which, as Gutierrez highlighted, is often a challenge for small-scale miners. In Kalinga province, mercury-free mining was successful because the people had access to education and support, there was clear control by an Indigenous association and very high local mercury prices.

In other places, such as Colombia, artisanal miners have opted for the coexistence model, which is when artisanal miners sell their ore to large-scale companies that have the resources to process it responsibly. Although this can reduce bureaucracy and pollution and promote formalization, this requires strong trust between the miners and the processing company, and miners are expected to accept a cut in their profits.

Be mindful of miners’ time and money

Responsible ASGM also needs government action as well, and not just action from miners, Gutierrez said. “Governments need to provide opportunities for miners to formalize and become legal in order to move the gold they produce from being sold to illegal markets to the formal market.”

For that to work, there has to be meaningful participation of mining stakeholders in the decision-making, to actually alert authorities about what approaches and regulations can work and be successfully implemented, Gutierrez said.

Take Ghana, for example, where more than 12% of the population relies on ASGM for survival and where the government formalized a licensing process to make ASGM legal businesses since 1989. Having a licensed mine decreases but does not eliminate damage to the land by introducing the obligation to rehabilitate land and follow environmental protocols. But today, certain obstacles make it difficult for miners to operate in a way that is socially and environmentally responsible, Kumah said.

As a result of high licensing costs and a lengthy registration process due to delays on the part of the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources, more than 85% of miners in the country choose to operate informally rather than deal with the hassle of formally becoming a business.

To be able to carry out ASGM activities in Ghana, under the country’s updated 2006 Minerals and Mining Act (Act 703), miners are required to apply for a small-scale mining license from the Minerals Commission, which forwards requests to the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources for final approval. This process ensures the sector remains regulated, as it allows authorities to better govern mining operations and ensure safety and environmental regulations are followed.

“The challenge we have, which is very serious at the moment, is that the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources is not signing the documents presented before them from the Minerals Commission,” Bawah said. “Some licenses have taken over three years,” he explained, and this leads people with little choice but to work without the licenses.

Ghana’s Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources did not reply to Mongabay’s requests for comment before the time of publication.

“A large group of miners who are pushed into the sector by economic hardships continue to operate informally and irresponsibly because they cannot afford the cost of registration and for that matter compliance,” Kumah told Mongabay. “This also means these larger groups of miners do not have access to the formal markets and the training opportunities being provided by various agencies.”

Instead, there must be a “deliberate policy effort to bring everyone onboard, rather than a restrictive policy framework” that deters them from seeking formal channels, he added.

Banner image: Small-scale miner using mercury while gold panning at an informal mine operation in Paracale, Camarines Norte, Philippines. Image by Minamata Convention Secretariat.

About 72% of gold miners poisoned with mercury at artisanal mining sites in Cameroon

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Citations:

Brunnschweiler, C. N., Karapetyan, D., & Lujala, P. (2024). Opportunities and risks of small-scale and artisanal gold mining for local communities: Survey evidence from Ghana. The Extractive Industry and Society, 17: 101403. doi:10.1016/j.exis.2024.101403

Gomez, F. H., Pelegri, N., Lopez, J. G., Torres, K. C. & Vaccari, M. (2024). Impact of Artisanal Gold Mining in Community Conserved Areas with High Biodiversity Using a Multi-Criteria Approach: A Case Study in Colombia. Pollutants, 4(2), 276-290. doi:10.3390/pollutants4020018

Krabbenhoft, D. P. (2004). Methylmercury Contamination of Aquatic Ecosystems: A Widespread Problem with Many Challenges for the Chemical Sciences. Water and Sustainable Development for the Chemical Sciences: A Workshop Report to the Chemical Sciences Roundtable. Recovered from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK83731/

Verbrugge, B., Lanzano, C. & Libassi, M. (2021). The cyanide revolution: Efficiency gains and exclusion in artisanal- and small-scale gold mining. Geoforum, 126, 267-276. doi:0.1016/j.geoforum.2021.07.030

Manzila, A.N. (2022). A study of alternative techniques to mercury amalgamation for gold extraction in artisanal and small-scale gold mining. Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, Department of Chemical Engineering. Recovered from: https://open.uct.ac.za/items/39f778fa-9c75-42ec-8283-35c8a0a8fdf4

Martinez, G., Restrepo-Baena, O. J. & Viega, M. M. (2021). The myth of gravity concentration to eliminate mercury use in artisanal gold mining. The Extractive Industries and Society, 8:1, 477-485. doi:10.1016/j.exis.2021.01.002

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