Environmental Disturbance and the Emergence of Tropical Disease: Lessons From the Gold Fields of Ghana – by Mario Machado (Huffington Post – September 29, 2014)

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Mario Machado is a recently returned Peace Corps volunteer (RPCV) and Independent Scholar.

This forest feels like an eternity as our four-wheel drive vehicle plods down yet another washed-out dirt road. This is the Central Region of Ghana and the lack of infrastructure only adds the ambiance as groups of women pass by with their loads of firewood balanced effortlessly on their head, their babies dozing comfortably in tow.

Abruptly, the trees stop and a barren dirt-scape throws the equatorial sun back into our faces. Compared to the shade of the canopy, this feels like the surface of the sun. And yet, despite the devastating heat, I can easily make out the distant silhouettes of people shoveling and sifting and working through this terrible hole in the earth.

As we get closer, the figures assume the faces and nuances of the tired men and women that they are. Holes in boots; tattered, stained clothing; knee deep in stagnant water with shovels or pick-axes or buckets of mud in hand. All for a paltry daily bounty of gold and the eternal promise to strike it rich someday. It’s enough to keep them busy and fed for now, but at a terrible cost to their bodies and the land. This is the face of unregistered small-scale mining in Ghana, called “galamsey” by the locals.

Ghana, the proverbial “Gold Coast”, has furnished the world with the gold for hundreds of years and although the mechanisms have changed — a colonial administration has been replaced by economic structures that are equally exploitative — the fundamental ethos remains the same: the wealth contained within this land does not belong to those that live and work it, but to those with the might to control it.

Mining concessions are acquired by multinational companies in a variety of ways. But whether legal and legitimate or illegal and fraudulent, the siphoning of mineral wealth from Africa is a faucet that continues to flow to the detriment of local peoples, often even despite truly noteworthy progress in terms of corporate social responsibility and promising partnerships between research and extractive industries. Governments with poor economies that lack the ability to commercialize their own resources rely on foreign corporations for the dominant influx of financial capital, technological know-how, and assets to glean any profits from their land.

This service does not come for free, of course, as these companies take more than their fair share. Whatever profits the governments keep, such as royalties, risk being eaten up by inefficient and corrupt bureaucracies. Little, if anything but poverty wages and environmental degradation seems to filter down to those local people upon whose livelihoods the mining companies and often complicit local chiefs thrive.

For Ghanaians who seek the promises of gold without the corporate structure, or those who lack the education to be hired by mining companies, there is always the option to go at it alone. It has become quite common across Ghana for groups of men and also women to begin their own small-scale mining operations, increasingly through partnerships with Chinese operators. With minimal investment, a group of galamsey miners can earn as much in a day as even the best cocoa farmers (Ghana’s leading agricultural export).

The problem, of course, is that once the gold has been extracted from the land through dangerous and damaging practices, nothing — not gold, nor farm land, nor forest — can take its place. Once an area is cleared and mined and no rehabilitation occurs, that land has lost virtually all value. It is a vicious and unsustainable cycle, but one with enticing short-term economic prospects, especially for poor young people with limited options.

For the rest of this column, click here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mario-machado/environmental-disturbance_1_b_5899850.html