Two artisanal gold mines collapsed this month, killing at least 62 people. Gold hit a three-month high days later. Inside the trade that produces a fifth of the world’s gold and almost none of its paperwork.
The tunnels at Zamboye ran under a hillside near the Central African Republic’s border with Cameroon, and on Tuesday, Aug. 18, several of them gave way at once. Rufin Benam Beltoungou, the country’s mines minister, counted 49 dead — 35 Central Africans, 12 Cameroonians, and two Chadians. A senior official at a local mining association told Reuters the number was above 100. The prosecutor said the count was still being established, opened a judicial inquiry, and the government suspended work at the site until further notice. It was the fourth fatal collapse in the country this year, after dozens died at Be-Mbari in June, seven at Ngourroum in March, and 20 at Gordi in February.
“The ground completely collapsed and buried people,” Cedric Mbango, a miner at the site, told Agence France-Presse. “As I speak to you, other people are still buried. Rescue attempts are under way.”
“Finding them alive would be a miracle,” said Bertrand Be Yangue, a city official. “We are saddened and heartbroken to see young men and women perish after coming to the mines to save their families from despair.”
The next night, halfway around the world in a rural stretch of Policarpa in Colombia’s Nariño department, a hillside came down on an open-pit gold mine and killed 13 people. The first reports described an explosion. Rescuers worked until about two in the morning, and by then it was clear the mine had simply slid. Witnesses said four of the dead were from one family, and residents said about 50 people worked the pit regularly, most of them Quillacinga. Somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000 Colombians work in artisanal mining.
Last Friday, silver touched $70 an ounce after a 20 percent run through August, and gold climbed above $4,600 to a three-month high on a Treasury decision to double its long-bond buybacks.
Artisanal and small-scale operations produce at least 20 percent of newly mined gold and employ roughly 80 percent of everyone who mines it, which is to say that four in five of the world’s gold miners account for one in five of the world’s gold. The International Labour Organization puts the workforce between 10 and 15 million people. The World Bank’s Delve database counts nearly 45 million working in artisanal mining across all minerals — 13.4 million of them women.
The work is done with hand tools, and the gold is separated from the ore with mercury, which binds the particles and is then burned off, usually over an open flame and usually without a mask. Artisanal gold mining is the largest source of mercury pollution on earth, responsible for close to 38 percent of global mercury emissions in the last full United Nations inventory.
“Mercury attacks the central nervous system and causes serious, lifelong health conditions, including brain, kidney and heart malfunctions; in high doses, it can kill,” Human Rights Watch wrote of the trade in Ghana. “And it is particularly harmful to children.”
Children are a significant part of the workforce. The US Department of Labor lists gold as a product of child labor in 28 countries, the Central African Republic and Colombia among them, and estimates that as many as 52,600 children work the gold mines in the Central African Republic, 13,800 of them under 14.
How many artisanal miners die each year is a question with no good answer. Researchers at Pact, working for the World Bank’s Delve program, counted 592 deaths in 37 incidents across 20 countries in 2019 using English-language news reports alone, found that falls of ground accounted for 73 percent of them, and modeled a global figure of roughly 30,250 a year, which they called “a sobering, but not unlikely number.” No comprehensive database of artisanal mining fatalities exists anywhere.
Where artisanal gold ends up
“Around 20% of the gold produced around the world comes from small-scale miners, but less than 0.05% of it goes through an LBMA-accredited refinery,” Neil Harby, chief technical officer of the London Bullion Market Association, told NBC News.
The rest travels other roads. Swissaid, the Swiss development organization, spent years tracing them and found that between 321 and 474 tonnes of African artisanal gold goes undeclared every year, worth as much as $35 billion, and that in 2022 roughly two-thirds of the gold the United Arab Emirates imported from Africa had been smuggled out of it. Switzerland holds four of the world’s nine largest refineries, and close to half of all gold imports pass through the country, where the law treats the last place of processing as the place of origin.
“Switzerland is not directly sourcing ASM gold from Africa, but Switzerland is sourcing a lot of gold from the UAE,” Yvan Schulz, who co-authored the research, told SWI swissinfo.ch. “Part of that gold very likely comes from Africa and from Africa ASM. So there’s a high risk that Switzerland might actually be sourcing a lot of ASM gold from Africa indirectly.”
Schulz was careful about where the blame belonged. “We walk a thin line between denouncing the problems that are there in this sector but we also don’t want to stigmatise the miners in the ASM sector because we are fully aware that they need this source of livelihood,” he said. “The miners have little impact on how the trade is done.”
Certified gold
There is a way to buy this gold cleanly, and it has existed since 2007. Fairmined is run by the Alliance for Responsible Mining, a nonprofit founded in 2004 in Envigado, Colombia, and certification demands legal title, an annual audit, a first-time score of at least 93, and payment of a $4,000 premium per kilogram directly to the mining organization, with a $6,000 tier for operations that use no toxic chemicals at all.
In 2019 the world bought 412 kilograms of it, which Human Rights Watch calculated at 0.0124 percent of that year’s gold mine production. By 2024 the figure had fallen to 74.12 kilograms. Thirty-five mining organizations have held the certification at some point across two decades; 10 hold it now, spread across two countries.
The Alliance explains the attrition as the lack of resources and challenges in mining territories such as “unsafe working conditions means that not all mining organizations can keep up with the high progressive requirements of the Fairmined Standard.”
Vilma Contreras, who heads a certified association on Peru’s Madre de Dios River, says it is costly to work in the formal sector “because you have to put personnel on the formal payroll, you have to pay all the taxes,” she told Context. “But if you want to work with peace of mind and without anyone bothering you, you have to reach this stage.”
For a few years in the middle of the last decade, certified gold had a face. Marion Cotillard wore the first piece from Chopard’s Green Carpet Collection at Cannes in May 2013. Cate Blanchett wore floral diamond earrings set in Fairmined gold to the Golden Globes that January. Léa Seydoux wore the collection to the BAFTAs. Eco-Age, the consultancy Livia Firth built to run the Green Carpet Challenge, had brokered the partnership after going looking for a jeweler willing to take it on.
“It is a shocking truth that 100 million people worldwide depend on artisanal and small-scale mining for their survival,” Firth wrote in 2014.
In March 2018 the house went further. “We are incredibly proud of being able to say that from July 2018 all of our gold will be purchased from responsible sources,” co-president Karl-Friedrich Scheufele said at a Baselworld press conference. “It is a bold commitment, but one that we must pursue if we are to make a difference to the lives of people who make our business possible.”
By 2025, 84 percent of the house’s ethical gold came from Swiss Better Gold accredited sites. Across its latest sustainability report, Fairmined appears twice, both times in a historical timeline, and Swiss Better Gold appears 17 times. The pledge still reads 100 percent.
Recycled gold’s complicated category
The industry’s current answer is recycled gold, a category loose enough that freshly mined metal can be counted as fabrication scrap within a week of leaving the ground. Between 2018 and 2021 the volume refined as recycled by accredited refiners rose 34 percent, from 2,139 tonnes to 2,872, while mine production over the same four years fell 2 percent.
“The industry has every interest in sticking to this broad definition of ‘recycled gold,'” Patrick Schein, a gold trader who serves as board president of the Alliance for Responsible Mining, told Vogue Business. “The more gold sources you can claim as recycled, the easier it is to claim a green image.”
Eleven organizations, among them the Alliance for Responsible Mining, Solidaridad, Swissaid, and Pact, signed an open letter in April 2024 putting it more plainly. “Cutting off ASM supply chains or making them invisible under the guise of ‘recycled’ gold perpetuates mining communities informality,” they wrote. “Not engaging with ASM is likely the biggest missed opportunity for gold supply chains to have a real positive social and environmental impact.”
Across the London Bullion Market Association’s published record since 2018, no refiner has been permanently struck from the Good Delivery List over sourcing or due diligence. Human Rights Watch last ranked jewelry companies on their supply chains in November 2020.
“Voluntary standards can encourage jewelry companies to adopt better practices, but ultimately only mandatory legal requirements will ensure that all jewelry companies take human rights seriously,” Juliane Kippenberg, associate director of the organization’s children’s rights division, said then.
Ghana’s president, John Mahama, was asked last year why his government could not simply close the informal mines. “When gold prices are that attractive, it creates an El Dorado effect,” he told TIME. “So it’s a blessing and a curse. It’s a complicated fight. So there’s also an issue of livelihoods. If you just stop them, what alternatives are you giving?”
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