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
