Ghana’s toxic gold rush

The landscape along the road approaching Konongo, in Ghana’s central Ashanti Region, had the feel of a sprawling construction site. On either side of the potholed thoroughfare, mounds of cinnamon-­colored dirt lurked just beyond the sparse greenery. Hulking excavators dotted the area, both at the roadside and off in the distance, straddling fields punctuated by turbid, muddy ponds.

It hadn’t always looked this way. “That’s the river we used to swim in as kids,” said Bobby Bright, gesturing out the window of our Mitsubishi Mirage. “We used the water for drinking and for irrigating our cocoa farms.”

The river in question was the color of coffee with heavy cream. It didn’t appear to flow at all. Bright, a 50-year-old IT specialist turned environmental activist, grew up in Konongo, on a farm that was owned by his grandfather. In 2017, having completed his university degree, Bright returned to Konongo with a plan to take up the cocoa and oil palm farming of his ancestors. But the hamlet’s trees had all been cut down. Bright’s uncle, like many in the region, had sold the family land to gold miners and promptly disappeared with the cash. Today, the cocoa and oil palm trees—like the fields of cassava, corn, and plantain that were also cultivated throughout Ashanti—are gone. They’ve been replaced by a jumble of cement-block homes interspersed with those ugly mounds of soil and murky ponds—the visible signs of a ferocious gold rush that has, not for the first time, upended life across Ghana.

For centuries, gold has been both a boon and a curse for this region. It was the area’s gold reserves that enabled the Ashanti Kingdom to emerge as one of West Africa’s most powerful in the late 1600s—just as it was gold that led to its undoing when the British, lured by the precious metal, descended on the land and, in the 19th century, ultimately colonized it. Ghanaians would not win independence until 1957.

As the country’s gold exports have ballooned, cocoa production has tanked.

Observers of this latest gold rush trace its origins to the global instability of the past few years, beginning with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. That jolt, in 2022, sent investors worldwide flocking to gold—known as a “safe-haven asset” for its enduring value—causing its price to soar. A year and a half later, the uncertainty ushered in by the war in Gaza drove the price of gold even higher. And then, earlier this year, came Donald Trump: His tariff threats turbocharged the phenomenon, with the price of gold hitting an all-time high in April.

As these events unfolded, they rippled across the world to Ghana, more than doubling the value of the country’s gold exports—and stoking an epidemic of illegal mining. This illegal version—a corruption of an old artisanal form of mining known as galamsey (a contraction of “gather them and sell”)—has exploded, as foreign nationals, mostly from China, have exploited the trade, and young locals, desperate for work, have jumped at the opportunity. Today, galamsey accounts for more than a third of Ghana’s annual gold output.

The result of this bonanza has been a fast-moving disaster, one that’s fueled multiple converging crises. The environmental impact has been particularly profound. As galamsey has spread, forests have been felled, earth torn up, and the once pristine countryside contaminated by heavy metals. Lead, cyanide, cadmium, arsenic, and mercury—especially mercury—have poisoned both land and water. “The devastation we are seeing in our forests and water bodies is beyond alarming,” said Muhammad Malik, of the Accra-based Climate Change Africa Initiative. “Illegal mining is stripping the land bare, polluting rivers, and killing ecosystems. If we don’t stop this, Ghana will face an environmental collapse [from which] we may never recover.”

An an active illegal mining site in the Ashanti Region, Ghana. July 10, 2025. Photo by Francis Kokoroko.

But the fallout goes beyond decimated forests and toxic waterways. Among galamsey’s other obvious casualties is Ghana’s all-important cocoa industry. The world’s second-largest cocoa producer (after the Ivory Coast), Ghana is home to more than 1 million cocoa farmers, most of whom tend small plots of just a few hectares that have been in their families for generations. The sector remains central to the Ghanaian economy, responsible for more than 20 percent of export revenue. But as the country’s gold exports have ballooned, cocoa production has tanked: Whereas gold receipts soared from $5 billion in 2021 to $11.6 billion last year, cocoa earnings shrank by more than a third—from $2.8 billion to $1.7 billion—over the same period. Many cocoa farmers, already struggling with climate-change-driven weather instability and a rampaging tree virus, are selling their land for the ready cash offered by miners. Others, like Bright, are being forced off their land. In May, Ransford Abbey, the CEO of Ghana’s government-controlled Cocoa Board, reported that 50,000 hectares of cocoa farms were at risk from illegal gold mining, among other threats.

“We’re facing the most serious crisis in the sector’s history,” Abbey said.

Bright and I had set out from Accra, Ghana’s capital, before the sun was up, heading north toward Kumasi. Even before we’d reached the despoiled river in Konongo, he’d been directing my attention to the young men in knee-high rubber boots manning noisy sluicing machines set on metal scaffolds. Red and blue hoses snaked over mounds of dirt and into muddy pools. “The entire country is under siege,” Bright said.

Around 2018, as Bright observed this new phenomenon unfolding—and absorbed the loss of his ancestral land to it—he began working with a handful of friends to inform the police about the illegal mining underway in the region. He knew that their efforts came with risk, but he couldn’t simply stand by as the destruction despoiled more and more of Ashanti. He was in Accra when he got word that three of these friends had been ambushed while they were en route to an illicit mining site: Two were killed with machetes and had their bodies dumped at the site, he said, while the third managed to get away. Locals reported that the police had blown the men’s cover in exchange for a payment from the miners. No one was ever prosecuted.

In the years since, Bright’s activism has expanded well beyond Ashanti. He blames a succession of Ghanaian governments that he says have failed to effectively regulate illegal mining or protect the country’s natural resources. Until three years ago, for instance, Ghanaian law largely prohibited mining in forest reserves, but in 2022 the administration of then-President Akufo-Addo passed legislation legalizing it—a move widely believed to have been a reward for campaign contributions. A few months ago, Ghana’s minister of lands and natural resources told the Parliament that 44 of the country’s 288 forest reserves, spanning six of its 16 regions, have been lost to unlawful mining. At this point, it seems that no corner of Ghana is safe.

Bobby Bright became an environmental activist after returning Ghana and seeing how illegal mining had destroyed his family’s cocoa farm. Photo by Francis Kokoroko.

Three years ago, Bright and some fellow environmentalists planted themselves in the driveway of Accra’s upscale Kempinski Hotel to protest a conference being held there by the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources, which oversees the mining sector. When police arrived to chase them away, Bright stood his ground. “I was there alone with my placard,” he said, “a one-man demonstration.” The scuffle that ensued landed him on local TV news, where he caught the attention of Awula Serwah, the formidable founder of the organization Eco-Conscious Citizens. Serwah, whose father served as an envoy to Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, began organizing against galamsey from England after learning about the deteriorated state of her beloved country. She moved back during the Covid pandemic and has been based in Accra ever since, working with Bright to help farming communities battling the onslaught of illegal mining.

Driving by another muddy river, we could hear the ticking sound of a machine known as the changfan. Though Ghanaian law prohibits mining within 100 meters of major water bodies, these Chinese-made contraptions—basically rafts mounted with motorized pumps and sluicing machines—enable workers to operate directly on the rivers, pumping the water and dredged-up soil over the sluices to separate the potentially gold-bearing solids. The miners we could see from the car, Bright said, were likely being paid by wealthy Ghanaians who are in business with Chinese nationals. The politically plugged-in locals know how to navigate Ghana’s laws and obtain licenses—80 percent of the country’s land is held under “customary governance,” meaning that tribal chiefs decide what gets allocated for what purpose—while the Chinese partners provide the excavators and changfans. Enlisting miners from among the million-plus young Ghanaians who are desperate for work presents little challenge.

The impromptu mines built by unregulated operations routinely collapse on the miners, while the artificial lakes and pits they leave behind have swallowed up multiple people, among them children. In Konongo, Bright said, miners have dug up so much land, including under homes and shops, that “the town itself is now just hanging.” In 2022, a young pregnant woman was buried alive in the nearby village of Odumase when the outhouse she’d entered collapsed on top of her.

Illegal gold miners use a motorized pump to scrap the river bed for specks of gold in southern Ghana. Photo by Cristina Aldehuela/AFP via Getty Images,

When we arrived in the village of Atronsu, a small cocoa-farming community of mud-block homes in the country’s Western Region, a 63-year-old farmer named Tomas Badu told us that a small group of Ghanaians whom nobody in the village knew had shown up a year earlier looking for land to mine. “The whole town was against it,” Badu said, emphasizing the importance of the nearby stream to the community for drinking and for watering their cocoa trees. (A Cocoa Board official told a reporter in 2022 that when farmers used polluted water on their cocoa crops, “every flower, as well as the pod on the tree, dropped.”)

Before the residents knew it, though, an excavator was making its way over the hill that leads to the town. Two households had apparently agreed to sign over a total of six acres to the miners. The land happened to abut the plot that Badu’s family has been tending for five generations. He led us along a path that wound through a stand of banana trees and past a clutch of teenage girls pounding cassava with long wooden poles. Cocoa beans lay spread out on a mat, drying in the sun. We walked under an imperious frankincense tree and into a cocoa forest, crunching through fallen leaves until we emerged from the cool to confront a vast, treeless expanse of churned-up dirt, some of which rose in little spindles, a sort of dwarf Arches National Park. Badu pointed toward a rectangular gully of stagnant brown water the size of a soccer field. The miners had dug the giant trench and diverted the local stream into it, he said, pumping the water over the sluice and leaving the toxic tailings behind. It was at least 20 feet deep, Badu said, and “anybody who falls in will die.”

As soon as the miners arrived in Atronsu, the community reached out to Eco-Conscious Citizens, which launched a campaign that eventually helped to land the intruders in jail. But they were released soon after, and they’ve long since moved on, leaving Badu and his neighbors to contend with the poisoned pool.

In February 2021, Paul Poku Sampene Ossei, a forensic pathologist at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, got a call from a coroner at the Bibiani Government Hospital, in the country’s Western North Region. A 20-year-old woman from a nearby mining area had died during childbirth, and the official overseeing the case was hoping that Sampene could remove the infant from the mother’s uterus in preparation for separate burials.

Though the infant he removed had reached 40 weeks of gestation, Sampene was disturbed to discover that its head was badly misshapen and its eyes had hardly developed at all. Both of the infant’s hands had six fingers; both of its feet, six toes. The genitalia were so undeveloped that the doctor couldn’t determine the baby’s sex. A month later, Sampene was called in to examine another young woman who had died mysteriously in childbirth. When he saw that the twins she was carrying bore similar deformities to the first baby, the doctor took samples from the infants’ brains, livers, kidneys, and bone marrow, as well as from the placenta and the cord blood. They all showed high concentrations of lead, mercury, cyanide, cadmium, and arsenic—and that pointed back to the mines.

These elements all occur naturally in the earth, buried deep within its crust, and get pulled to the surface during mineral extraction. What’s worse, gold miners and processors around the world use mercury to isolate the precious metal from its surrounding rubble—mercury and gold bind and can then be separated by fire—and the element eventually settles in the air, water, and soil. Today, artisanal gold mining is responsible for an astounding 38 percent of all mercury emitted worldwide—more than any other human activity, including the combustion of coal.

In the years since those first cases, the 59-year-old Sampene has performed autopsies on 13 additional infants and examined the placentas from more than 1,450 women residing in areas plagued by illegal mining. Among the specimens preserved in tall jars on a shelf in his Kumasi lab are a baby with an exaggerated cleft palate and another with four legs growing horizontally from its lower abdomen. “All the three components of life—the water, the soil, and the air—have been compromised,” Sampene told me. “This is no secret.”

A 2025 study published in Environmental Monitoring and Assessment found that the soil in gold-mining areas of the Ashanti Region had levels of mercury and cadmium that were significantly higher than the permissible limits set by the World Health Organization. The mercury measured 9.33 mg/kg, well above the WHO’s limit of 2 mg/kg, while the cadmium came in at 17.02 mg/kg, far exceeding the WHO’s 3 mg/kg limit. In 2021, the WHO reported that exposure to mercury, a potent neurotoxin, posed “a particular threat to the development of the child in utero and early in life” and could lead to spontaneous abortions and all manner of congenital abnormalities.

Sampene told me about a young gold buyer who woke up one morning in 2023 to find his entire body shaking. His hands were so out of control that he couldn’t hold a pen to write. Given that the twentysomething had spent the previous eight years wielding a blowtorch beneath amalgams of gold and mercury, the doctor wasn’t surprised to find him suffering from ataxia, a disorder that has been directly linked to damage in the cerebellum caused by exposure to mercury. In the months since, other gold buyers have turned up at Sampene’s lab seeking relief for their mercury-poisoned bodies. “The alarming thing is that, as a developing country, we don’t have what it takes to solve these things,” he told me, “and the medications are not readily available.”

Ghana’s Water Resources Commission recently declared that more than 60 percent of the nation’s rivers are now polluted with heavy metals. At some of its treatment plants, the turbidity is so extreme that the pumps have broken down. Experts now warn that the country may need to begin importing water as soon as 2030. In the meantime, some of the 7 million Ghanaians living in extreme poverty and unable to buy bottled or “sachet” water—filtered or sanitized water sealed in small plastic bags—are stuck with the polluted stuff. (Even the water bought in stores here is considered unreliable; the country’s gold bosses are said to import theirs from Europe or South Africa.)

More recently, Ernest Yoke, the vice president of the Ghana Medical Association, reported that heavy metals have made their way into the nation’s food supply. “Rice, fish, and even livestock are showing traces of mercury and cyanide,” he said, “and this is extremely dangerous for consumers.” A 2023 study found that tomatoes, spring onions, and lettuces grown in the Western Region had levels of arsenic, cadmium, lead, and mercury above the limits stipulated by the WHO and that the dietary intake of vegetables grown at the site “poses severe health and environmental threats.” It’s not just people in the mining communities who have to worry; shoppers in Accra and Kumasi now warily pile their baskets with fruits, vegetables, and legumes sourced from rural areas.

The same day we spoke with Sampene, Bright and I made our way through the dense Kumasi traffic to the sprawling campus of the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital. There we met a bespectacled pediatrician named Anthony Enimil, who told us about the kids turning up at his practice with swollen feet and the poisoned grade-schoolers that he’d had to put on dialysis. In 2023, the Pediatric Society of Ghana determined that the heavy metals involved in unlicensed gold mining were “significantly contributing” to the deaths of exposed children. Over the past few years, Enimil said, he and his colleagues have noted a marked uptick in chronic kidney diseases among juvenile patients from these areas, echoing a 2024 report from Yoke of “a spike in kidney-related diseases in mining communities” and warning of “a major public-health crisis.”

“The truth is, we are destroying ourselves,” Enimil said.

At 7:30 on a Wednesday morning, Asan­kragua, a town in the Western Region that’s known as a ga­lamsey hot spot, was buzzing. Young miners streamed along the main thoroughfare toting drills and canteens, while others zipped by, two to a moped, balancing long metal detectors in their laps. On the buildings, signs in Chinese advertised foot massages, gold-trading shops, changfans, and excavators. (The latter now represent the country’s third-largest import.) “Ah!” Bright cried as two teens zoomed past us on a motorbike. “They are high on drugs, acting crazy. Anywhere there is galamsey,” he added, “there is crime—weapons, drugs, prostitution.”

We spent the next several hours bumping over a deeply rutted road that took us far into Ghana’s hinterland. (Successive governments appear to have had little interest in upgrading the country’s infrastructure, a situation made worse by the fact that illegally mined gold—much of which gets smuggled out of the country—costs the state an estimated $2 billion annually in uncollected taxes.) At one point, we could make out in the distance a handful of Chinese miners puttering around in a camp they’d constructed from shipping containers and tarps. We passed mud huts, as well as more dug-up fields and stagnant ponds. “Animals would not do this to their kingdom,” Bright said. “But humans? Oh, God—look at these people. They’re all going to die. You think they can afford bottled water?”

The next day, driving into the coastal town of Takoradi, we passed young bushmeat vendors dangling greater cane rats (“grass cutters”) by their tails and women hawking cassava mash in bright-blue plastic bags. Conspicuously absent from this seaside tableau was anyone selling fish. Out the car window, we could see why: The pollution from the river was rippling into the sea in pale yellow waves. Fishermen living by this estuary can no longer catch anything close to shore, we learned, and because their canoes can’t reach beyond the polluted water, their livelihoods have collapsed. (We were warned not even to wade near the beach hotel where we spent the night.)

We did manage to find one bright spot amid the gloom. In the town of Jema, a leafy enclave in the Bono East Region, we met some of the cocoa farmers in the community who are taking a defiant stand.

A Ghanaian farmer stirs cocoa beans in banana leaves before covering them and leaving them to ferment. Photo by Cristina Aldehuela/AFP via Getty Images.

“We prefer to die than to mine,” a 60-year-old named Patrick Fome told us. This despite the fact that Ghana’s cocoa farmers earn less than $100 a month and that selling their land, or turning to mining themselves, would undoubtedly mean more cash in the short run. (Badu and his brother had laughed when I asked their opinion of chocolate; they’d never tasted it.)

In 2019, led by their chief, a lifelong cocoa farmer named Nana Enuku Ano II, the nearly 8,000 residents of Jema made their feelings official, signing a petition that they would eventually deliver to the Ghanaian president. Last year, with the help of a charismatic Franciscan friar named Joseph Kwame Blay, the town formed a vigilante watchdog group, the Jema Anti-Galamsey Advocates, or JAGA, to ensure that the miners stay away. “We do missions, day in and day out, at the edges of our land,” Fome said. “We don’t want them to even penetrate.”

He led us down a path through the cocoa trees to a burbling stream, the first clear water we’d seen in a week. The plan is for Jema’s pristine rivers—approximately 50 run through this territory—to anchor an eco­tourism project that the town is in the process of developing, said Blay, a local celebrity with close-cropped gray hair and a saintly aura. The project is set to include a 10-acre biodiversity forest and a few fish farms, and the hope is to eventually get some sort of “galamsey-­free” certification for the food it grows.

We traversed the mud-block village to arrive at the home of Chief Nana, where his wife led us into a room with electric-­blue walls. Having suffered a stroke about 10 years ago, the chief sat slumped but alert at the edge of a double bed. I’d heard that he had vowed never to betray his ancestors by letting outsiders despoil their land, and speaking in a strained whisper, he reiterated that commitment to me. The miners had apparently dangled as much as 700,000 cedis (over $65,000) in front of him, even offering to send him to South Africa for medical treatment. “He told them to keep it,” Fome said. When it comes to galamsey, Chief Nana “doesn’t even want to talk about that word.”

Over the years, Ghana’s leaders have introduced various initiatives to try to deal with the galamsey menace. During his first term, from 2012 to 2017, the recently reelected president, John Mahama, expelled 4,500 Chinese nationals after raiding illegal mining sites. In 2017, Akufo-Addo established an Inter-Ministerial Committee on Illegal Mining and a task force comprising 400 members of the military. From 2017 to 2019, the team arrested more than 2,200 illegal miners, including foreign nationals.

But corruption is rampant, from the cops, who flagged us down every 10 miles expecting a bribe, to the politicians, who are happy to look the other way in exchange for a campaign contribution. (A 2019 documentary by the award-­winning filmmaker Anas Aremeyaw Anas features senior officers from the Inter-­Ministerial Committee receiving bribes and encouraging illegal mining.) A 2023 report commissioned by the president’s chief of staff found significant lapses in the functions of the country’s regulatory agencies, including its Minerals and Forestry commissions. In particular, the report found a lack of consistency when it came to issuing mining licenses. It also found that people accused of illegal mining or of financing illegal mines, including a member of Parliament, had received light or no punishments. The quick release of many Chinese miners from detention over the years has also led to allegations of police corruption. The Berlin-based watchdog Transparency International found that the Ghanaian government had discontinued a major trial and deported an accused Chinese miner rather than imposing the stiff sanctions provided by national law. Not incidentally, China is Ghana’s largest trading partner and a major source of foreign investment.

The EU and Japan announced that they would begin inspecting cocoa imports from Ghana out of a concern over their possible contamination with heavy metals.

“The firefighters are the arsonists,” said Ken Ashigbey, who heads an organization called the Media Coalition Against Galamsey.

In addition, the mining operations have become increasingly militarized, with armed soldiers—many of them hopped up on energy drinks spiked with tramadol or cocaine—standing sentinel at sites deep within the forest reserves. In the past few months, a member of a commission that controls mining in forest reserves was attacked by armed men, and three journalists reporting on galamsey were assaulted—despite being accompanied by Ghanaian police. (Bright and I were chased down the highway by illegal miners and forced to the side of the road by a wild-eyed security guard who demanded, “Your phone or your life.”)

Many Ghanaians compared their predicament to that of Latin Americans caught in the grip of violent drug cartels. In February, the United Nations said as much, reporting that organized crime groups have now embedded themselves in gold supply chains to such an extent that they pose a serious global threat. While Ghana has stood for decades as a peaceful oasis in a region increasingly plagued by terror attacks, military coups, and insurrectionist movements, its slide toward lawlessness is now threatening to draw those troubles south. In Kumasi, we saw young girls in headscarves begging by the side of the road. Trafficked in from Burkina Faso and Mali, they are a growing presence in the country, particularly at galamsey sites.

Protesters demand government action on illegal gold mining in Accra, Ghana, on October 3, 2024. Photo by Nipah Dennis/AFP via Getty Images.

The situation could soon become much worse. In May, the European Union and Japan announced that they would begin inspecting cocoa imports from Ghana this September, out of a concern over their possible contamination with heavy metals. The Dutch ambassador to Ghana warned that the country’s cocoa—20 percent of the global supply—risks being rejected wholesale by the EU.

One of the largest markets for Ghanaian cocoa beans is the United States, which imports some $154 million worth every year. The US Food and Drug Administration hasn’t made any statements about the heavy metals situation in Ghana, but that may not be as reassuring as it sounds: In April, the Trump administration’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, laid off nearly 1,900 of the FDA’s employees, among them experts in charge of compliance policy and the staff who coordinated their travel. The cuts have also led to the closing of many of the FDA labs where products are tested for contaminants and the shuttering of the press office. A longtime FDA official told me that he couldn’t be sure whether anyone was updating the agency’s inspection dashboard—the exact place a consumer would go to check up on companies buying cocoa from Ghana, such as Nestlé, Hershey, Mars, and Cargill.

Ghanaians are tired of it all. In the past several months, the Catholic Bishops Conference embarked on a national anti-­galamsey prayer walk, the country’s labor unions threatened a national strike, and the pop star Black Sherif paused his concert midway to air footage of the nation’s polluted rivers. Crowds now routinely take to the streets of Accra wielding signs that read “Greed Is Killing Ghana” and “Stop Ecocide” and brandishing bottles of murky brown water. Illegal gold mining was among the top issues for voters during last year’s presidential election.

The new administration is at least talking a good game. This year it created a Ghana Gold Board and opened the nation’s first commercial refinery, both intended to rein in the criminality and smuggling. Stories about its numerous anti-galamsey stings, meanwhile—complete with the number of Ghanaians and Chinese arrested, and of excavators, bulldozers, changfans, pump-action guns, and motorbikes confiscated—have become a regular feature of the news. But while the legislators make a show of their attempts to tackle galamsey, Eco-­Conscious Citizens and others are demanding that they do more—in particular by rescinding the law that allows for mining in forest reserves and by stationing military personnel inside each one. Bright believes that the situation is so dire that the world should boycott Ghana’s gold and cocoa, in the same way that it did Charles Taylor’s conflict timber and blood diamonds from Sierra Leone.

“If the cocoa sector collapses,” Ransford Abbey, the Cocoa Board CEO, has admitted, “Ghana’s economy will collapse. But it’s not just about cocoa, it’s about national economic security.”

Ghanaians will tell you that galamsey is about something even more existential. Over the course of my time there, I heard repeated references to the country’s glorious past, to the heady days just after independence and the decades of peace and prosperity that followed. “Ghana used to be so good,” Father Blay said. “Now you can’t even travel alone.” Erastus Asare Donkor, a journalist known nationwide for his galamsey exposés, recalled an idyllic childhood in his grandmother’s village, where he would swim in the stream and sometimes see chimpanzees wander out from the forest. “To know that those things are gone?” he said. “It hurts me, deep down.”

Anthony Enimil was focused on the kids. “I know the implications for their future. We’re not leaving anything for them,” he said. “I really wish things would change,” he added, “because it is not too late. But it’s getting there.”