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THE OTHER SIDE OF TRUMP’S TARIFFS: GHANA’S TOXIC GOLD RUSH  
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Jocelyn C. Zuckerman
September 15, 2025
The Nation
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_ As gold prices spike across the globe, illegal mining is
exploding—and driving the west African country toward ecological
collapse. _

An unhappy prospect: A group of men engaged in illegal gold mining
look for specks of gold in Kibi in southern Ghana., Melanie Stetson
Freeman / The Christian Science Monitor

 

This article was produced in collaboration with the Food &
Environment Reporting Network [[link removed]], an independent
non-profit news organization. It appears in the October 2025 issue.
[[link removed]] 

he 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 They’ve been replaced by a jumble of cement-block homes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
[[link removed]] 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.

Observers of this latest gold rush trace its origins
[[link removed]] to
the global instability of the past few years, beginning with
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. That jolt, in 2022, sent investors
worldwide flocking
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] the
price of gold even higher. And then, earlier this year, came Donald
Trump: His tariff threats turbocharged
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] 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.”

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
[[link removed]] (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
[[link removed]] of
export revenue. But as the country’s gold exports have ballooned,
cocoa production has tanked [[link removed]]:
Whereas gold receipts soared from $5 billion in 2021 to $11.6 billion
last year, cocoa earnings shrank by more than a third
[[link removed]]—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
[[link removed]] 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.

The price of gold: A small-scale gold mining site in Tarkwa, Ghana,
October 2024.(Francis Kokoroko / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

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.

This is not how mining has traditionally been done in Ghana. Since the
1980s, the gold industry here has been dominated by multinational
corporations like AngloGold Ashanti and Gold Fields—large-scale
operations that, despite funneling cash out of the country, have
abided for the most part by its environmental and other laws. And for
decades, private citizens have used pickaxes and shovels to forage for
bits of gold near the surface, giving smallholder farmers a way to
supplement their meager earnings. But beginning around 2013, when the
Chinese government started building infrastructure projects in Ghana
as part of its Belt and Road Initiative
[[link removed]], industrial-­grade
excavators and bulldozers flooded into the country, changing the face
of artisanal mining. Galamsey became serious business.

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
[[link removed]]—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
[[link removed]] 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.

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
[[link removed]].
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.

Walking the talk: Environmental activist Bobby Bright protests against
the illegal mining known locally as galamsey, in Accra, Ghana.(FERN /
Francis Kokoroko)

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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] Ghanaians
who are desperate for work presents little challenge.

The impromptu mines built by unregulated operations routinely
collapse
[[link removed]] on
the miners, while the artificial lakes and pits they leave behind
have swallowed up
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] in
the nearby village of Odumase when the outhouse she’d entered
collapsed on top of her.

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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] 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.

Hard labor: Men work in an open-pit illegal gold mine in western
Ghana.(Cristina Aldehuela / AFP via Getty Images)

n 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
[[link removed]] 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 [[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed].].
In the meantime, some of the 7 million Ghanaians living in extreme
poverty
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] 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.

AN ENDANGERED EXISTENCE: Cocoa farmers open harvested cocoa pods to
remove the beans in a farm in Asikasu in 2020.(Cristina Aldehuela /
AFP via Getty Images)

t 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
[[link removed]].)
“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
[[link removed]] 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.

“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
[[link removed]],
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.”

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
[[link removed]] after
raiding illegal mining sites. In 2017, Akufo-Addo established
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] features senior officers from the
Inter-­Ministerial Committee receiving bribes and encouraging illegal
mining.) A 2023 report commissioned
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] 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 [[link removed]] and a major
source of foreign investment.

“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 [[link removed]],
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.

The situation could soon become much worse. In May, the European Union
and Japan announced
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed].] that
the country’s cocoa—20 percent
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]],
“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.”

_JOCELYN ZUCKERMAN is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn. The former
deputy editor of Gourmet, and articles editor of OnEarth, she
focuses on agriculture, the environment, and the global south. Her
2021 book, Planet Palm, was shortlisted for the New York Public
Library's Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism._

_Copyright c 2025 THE NATION. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
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Distributed by PARS International Corp
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_Founded by abolitionists in 1865, The Nation has chronicled the
breadth and depth of political and cultural life, from the debut of
the telegraph to the rise of Twitter, serving as a critical,
independent, and progressive voice in American journalism._

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