Ghana, the world’s second-biggest cocoa producer, is facing a crisis as farmers abandon their land for illegal gold mining, driven by higher gold prices and low cocoa returns. Aanu Adeoye and Susannah Savage of the Financial Times report that this boom is damaging the environment, reducing cocoa production, and raising global chocolate prices. They write:
Ghanaian cocoa farmers are abandoning beans for bullion in an illegal gold mining boom that has ravaged the country’s cocoa production and helped drive global chocolate prices to historic highs. […]
Isaac Frimpong, a 31-year-old farmer, had designs on establishing his first farm after a decade of working for others. But in January he visited the small tract of land he had leased with a 5,000 cedis ($320) deposit, he found it had been overrun by gold diggers.
“The land is unusable now,” said Frimpong, who recalled nearly coming to blows with the men who took his land for “galamsey”, the local term for the practice of illegal gold mining. The landowner has refused to return Frimpong’s deposit, which took him a year to cobble together. […]
“Anyone that goes up country sees it wherever they go. And it devastates every farm it touches,” Fountain said. “Once galamsey has been in your farms, the soil and water are a contaminated wasteland.” […]
Ayim believes the best protection Ghana could aspire to is better regulation of small-scale mining, since there is often an uptick in petty crimes when mining is curtailed. “For the young men doing this, it’s about survival. Surface mining cannot be stopped but maybe it can be done responsibly,” he said.
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