The hidden cost of the gold rush

**Ed Butler** (0:03)
Hello, welcome to Business Daily on the BBC World Service. I'm Ed Butler, and today I'm with the illegal miners of West Africa, digging for gold.

**Kelly Mbayo** (0:12)
The work is too dangerous.

**Ed Butler** (0:15)
It's dangerous.

**Alfred** (0:15)
Yes, anything can happen. You can hear some people have gone, they have died.

**Kelly Mbayo** (0:21)
But only God can protect us.
The human being cannot protect us. Only God.

**Ed Butler** (0:26)
The spread of illegal mining, fuelled by a surge in gold prices over recent years, is raising humanitarian and environmental fears around the world. Are Western governments, even the US Mint, feeding the illicit gold trade?

**Justin Sheck** (0:41)
So the US Mint has experts in money laundering, illicit finance, the world's foremost experts work there.
I'm not an expert. If I could find this using public records and phone calls, I think the experts could find this.

**Ed Butler** (0:55)
The price of the gold rush. That's Business Daily from the BBC.
So let me describe this place. We're in a place called Comoros, which is just like a huge bowl in the middle of the forest. Around me are these gigantic, beautiful, impressive trees lining a mountainside in every direction.
But in the middle of this valley is this huge shanty scoured out of the red-brown earth. It's just ditch after ditch. It's like some scene from a battlefield. You can hear the machines. They're sifting water through filters to basically pull out the tiny little nuggets of gold and refine those for sale. It's precarious living. You can see that this is a dirt-poor place. Every house is just tarpaulin roofs, makeshift wooden poles. And there are hundreds, literally hundreds of people here, all digging, sifting, dreaming.

**Kelly Mbayo** (2:07)
We do illegal mining more than five years now. It's where I live and feed my family, here in Kumaro.

**Ed Butler** (2:16)
That's Kelly Mbayo. He's a local gold miner in Sierra Leone, running a small team here amidst the golden mud of this makeshift settlement.

**Kelly Mbayo** (2:27)
We work together with the pumping machine to filter the mud. We do pound it.
From there, we get what we want, which is the gold.

**Ed Butler** (2:37)
So this is just tiny little grains of gold?

**Kelly Mbayo** (2:41)
It is just tiny. It's just tiny little, just for survival.

**Ed Butler** (2:44)
You would just see them like grains of sand in your hand.

**Kelly Mbayo** (2:47)
Exactly.

**Ed Butler** (2:48)
And how much money does that earn you?

**Kelly Mbayo** (2:50)
Yeah, it's about 2000 plus. 2000 plus.

**Ed Butler** (2:54)
2000 Leones, which is $40 a day.

**Kelly Mbayo** (2:57)
I'm sharing the money between me and my boys, because we do work it together.
Job facility in this country is low. So most of the youth, they came here. Most of their wives are here also selling pure water, just to make ends meet.

**Ed Butler** (3:13)
What's it like here? How would you describe this town?

**Kelly Mbayo** (3:16)
In one word, it's a place for survival. You know?

**Ed Butler** (3:22)
It's not fun. It's just survival.

**Kelly Mbayo** (3:24)
Yeah, a place where if you're hard working today, you come today, you have a survival.

**Ed Butler** (3:30)
How come the authorities aren't closing you down? It's all illegal mining.
It's pretty obvious. Everyone can see you.

**Kelly Mbayo** (3:39)
Yeah, it's illegal. But if the authorities say today nobody is going to work.
They do tax the machine's owner, you know, the grinding machine owner.

**Ed Butler** (3:52)
So they let you work and you have to pay them taxes?

**Kelly Mbayo** (3:55)
Something like 250 weekly, weekly taxes to the authorities because...

**Ed Butler** (4:01)
So for each machine, each one of those pumping machines, they're paying 250 liuns, which is about what? $10.

**Kelly Mbayo** (4:08)
Yeah, which is about $10. They do cajure them.

**Ed Butler** (4:12)
And do you use mercury to refine the gold?

**Kelly Mbayo** (4:18)
Yeah, I do use mercury every day. Every day I work, I use mercury.

**Ed Butler** (4:23)
It's dirty stuff, isn't it? I mean, it's not good for the environment here.

**Kelly Mbayo** (4:27)
I know. Mercury is not good for the environment. And even the National Mine Agency, if they see mercury with you, they will arrest you.
It's illegal substance.

**Ed Butler** (4:39)
You have to use it.

**Kelly Mbayo** (4:42)
Without no mercury, there is no gold.

**Ed Butler** (4:46)
Mercury has been the bane of artisanal mining for years. In Ghana some years ago, I met a miner, Francis, who with the help of a bucket and a blowtorch, showed me how he used mercury to condense the gold particles.