Wednesday, July 24, 2019

Ghana's Gold Doesn't Glitter

Early colonists called this region the Gold Coast. The Ashanti people of southern Ghana have long made fortunes from what Ghanaians call “galamsay” (gather-and-sell) mining. Since 2008, gold prices have risen, digging equipment from China has become cheap and easy to get, and informal mining has mushroomed.

Vast amounts of gold from Africa's informal mines go to the United Arab Emirates, much of it smuggled. Since 2003, the UAE has reported importing about $10.6 billion (8.5 billion pounds) worth of Ghanaian gold. No industrial miners send gold to the UAE, the companies have told Reuters

A 2016 report by researchers for the International Institute for Environment and Development estimated a million people in Ghana make a living in what some call artisanal mining, and 4.5 million more depend on it. Sub-Saharan Africa is home to almost 10 million such miners, according to a World Bank estimate: At least 60 million more are reliant on the sector. 

As miners go for gold, they are poisoning rivers, farmland - and themselves. 

Miners inhale fumes from explosives used to loosen rocks, and dust coming off crushing machines, which contains heavy metals such as lead. This weakens the lungs.

They use mercury and nitric acid, which also cause breathing problems, to leach precious ore out of sediment. Then they toss the chemicals to the ground or into rivers. 

Mercury is an especially dangerous poison. After long exposure to the vapour, cases of pulmonary fibrosis, restrictive lung disease, and chronic respiratory insufficiency have been reported in the United States. In Ghana, too, researchers have published dozens of papers documenting evidence of mercury-linked toxicity in the blood and urine of residents, as well as mercury contamination in soil, food, water and fish. Around Bawdie, in 2016, Ghanaian researchers in a University of Michigan-funded study found average mercury levels in the water were at least 10 times higher than international safety levels, or up to 86 times higher in one area. A United Nations report published this year said artisanal and small-scale gold mining accounts for up to 80% of emissions of mercury in Sub-Saharan Africa. One study, published by the Lancet in 2018, estimated that more than 10 million people in Africa are exposed to mercury by artisanal mining, cutting short by almost two years their expectations for a healthy life. Mercury poisons every tissue it touches.
Besides lung damage, it can lead to memory loss, irritability or depression, kidney failure, tremors or numbness, and discoloured, peeling or scaly skin. Extreme mercury poisoning can cause paralysis, coma, or insanity. 

Even people who are not directly exposed absorb it through water or, for those near the coast, seafood. In a developing foetus, it can cause difficulties with mobility and learning. But the poison works slowly, making it hard to diagnose. And informal miners rarely take precautions. In Ghana, Ngoha and other miners said they would rip open sachets of mercury with their teeth, sometimes sucking it out and spitting it into bowls. They got it on their hands and didn’t wash before eating. They inhaled the fumes. Mining dust and mercury fumes make people more vulnerable to lung diseases, including TB. Half the adult population in rural Ghana have the TB bacteria in their throats, although most are resistant. A government study in 2013 had put the TB mortality rate nationwide at 7.5 per 1,000 cases. The numbers who failed to respond to treatment meant there must be more to this than TB, Dr. Frederick Sarpong, concluded. 

They will come to the hospital ... coughing up blood,” he said. “You might think it’s tuberculosis, but actually this is mercury poisoning.”
Samuel Essien-Baidoo, a researcher at Ghana’s University of Cape Coast, studied the impact of mercury on miners in the Western Region. “Their kidneys were damaged, some extensively,” he said. A number had skin rashes and most suffered from itchy eyes, hair loss and persistent headaches. Mercury was a problem, he concluded: Two-thirds of patients on dialysis at the Cape Coast teaching hospital were from the gold mining region. 

Ghana’s entire health budget for the next three years totals $850 million, so hospitals can’t offer dialysis for free. The ones who can’t pay “simply die,” Essien-Baidoo said. Treatments to remove heavy metals are out of reach of Ghanaian wildcat miners. Officially in Ghana, as in many other countries, mercury is a controlled substance. Ghana’s 1989 Mercury Act allows miners to keep “reasonable quantities” for mining, but they can buy it only from licensed dealers. Ghana has also pledged to join a global pact named after the Minamata disaster to phase out mercury use in mining. Safer mining methods that have been proposed include burning off the mercury under glass to capture the fumes and condense them back into liquid. But the glass is fragile and tricky to handle. Another method requires a furnace and a source of energy, so it too hasn’t been widely used. In Ghana as elsewhere, mercury is smuggled in. Globally, the U.N. estimates informal miners spilled about 1,220 tonnes of mercury into soil and water in 2015 – 252 tonnes of it in Africa, and even more in South America. 

Even so, efforts by health and environmental experts to stop or clean up informal mining almost always hit the same snag: For people with few other options, there’s too much money to be made in gold. “Illegal mining has had a devastating effect on our environment,” Environment Minister Kwabena Frimpong-Boateng told Reuters in the capital, Accra. 

He said 80% of Ghana’s waterways were polluted by miners stirring up sediment and dumping waste. The World Bank gives a similar figure. It says many of Ghana’s waterways have been effectively blocked, causing flooding upstream, which destroys farmland or cocoa fields. Last year, the state-run Ghana Water Company temporarily shut down four treatment plants, citing pollution caused by mining



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