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APAMPRAMA, Ghana — Since 2017, the Ghanaian government has aggressively pursued small-scale miners operating in forest reserves across the country, blaming them for the destruction of the country’s forests. But at the same time the government is promoting industrial-scale gold extraction by granting a flurry of mining licenses, many of them overlapping with those same forest reserves.
Environmental campaigners are chronicling the toll of both legal and illegal mineral extraction on the country’s woodlands. What they’ve found in the Apamprama reserve, which covers 3,630 hectares (8,970 acres) in the Ashanti region of the country illustrates the threat miners — big and small — pose to forested areas.
A third of the Apamprama forest disappeared in little more than 20 years.
The moist evergreen forest of Apamprama lies in the catchment of the Oda and Offin rivers, tributaries of the mighty Pra that traverses southern Ghana before entering the Gulf of Guinea. Gold sediments carried by these rivers have over the years attracted miners of all kinds, from local residents eking out a living with basic tools, to big industrial operators.
“Illegal mining has been happening in the forest since 2015, but on a very small scale,” Asante Richard, a local representative of Abuakwaa, one of the administrative regions where Apamprama lies, told Mongabay. But, he said, a concession given to the Heritage Imperial Company Limited in 2018 sharply changed the fate of the forest, leading to massive destruction.
Satellite data from Global Forest Watch show that forest loss has accelerated in the reserve since 2018, when Heritage Imperial first obtained a license to prospect for gold there.
The prospecting permit obtained by the company in October 2017 was converted into a full-fledged industrial mining license in June 2020. In April 2022, Heritage received another exploitation license to mine in a different section of the reserve. Between its two claims, the company has unfettered access to almost the entire reserve — or whatever is left of it.
In his 2021 report, then-environment minister Kwabena Frimpong-Boateng, accused Heritage Imperial of destroying the Apamprama forest and polluting the Offin River. The Oda River cuts through the reserve before joining the Offin (also spelled Ofin) further south of Apamprama. The company allowed bulk mining activities even when it held only an exploration license, the report said.
Heritage Imperial didn’t respond to Mongabay’s requests for comment by the time of publishing. In public statements, the company’s managing director, Donald Emmanuel Entsuah, has denied the company was responsible for the damage, saying other miners were illegally occupying its concessions.
Industrial operators misuse licenses, Frimpong-Boateng’s report alleged, from companies not implementing environmental mitigation measures to concession holders allowing illegal miners to “buy” sections of their concessions.
Jasper Abembia Ayelazuno, a social scientist at Ghana’s University for Development Studies, told Mongabay that legality was no guarantee mining wasn’t harming protected areas. “It is laughable for a government concerned about the destruction of the environment to think that large-scale mining is fine because they present a report on how they will protect the environment,” Ayelazuno said.
While political leaders, companies and their advocates bicker over who is responsible for Apamprama’s destruction, its impacts are being felt in communities neighboring the reserve.
Over thousands of years, erosion of gold-bearing rocks by rivers and streams has deposited gold-enriched silt in Ghana’s Ashanti region, often found in and around rivers still flowing today. At Apamprama, the riverbanks are riddled with open mining pits, where miners have peeled away the vegetation and stripped the fertile topsoil to reach these ancient sediments. This scene of destruction is repeated throughout the Ashanti region.
Those involved in artisanal mining, known here as galamsey, traditionally use basic tools like picks and shovels to dig the soil. However, recent Mongabay reporting documented the proliferation of heavy machinery like excavators even in the small-scale mining sector.
Frimpong-Boateng’s report also highlighted widespread mechanization in small-scale operations. Data shared by Ghana’s Forestry Commission appeared to confirm the trend. Over three months in the first half of 2023, Rapid Response Units (RRUs) set up by the commission to tackle illegal forest activity confiscated “58 chainsaw machines, 39 power [generators], 25 barrels of diesel,” and “destroyed 43 excavators” in raids on illegal mining operations in forest reserves.
Appiah Ebenezer, who leads an RRU, told Mongabay that small-scale illegal miners in Apamprama also use heavy machinery like excavators to move the earth.
Mongabay witnessed Ebenezer’s team raid an illegal mining site in the Abuakwaa section of the reserve, confiscating water pumps, washing boards and generators. They burnt the equipment on site.
The water pumps are used to extract water from the river to wash gold-bearing sediments. Water in streams visited by Mongabay was brown and muddy, caused by dredging of sediments from riverbeds. Waterways have also become dumping grounds for dangerous chemicals.
Kofi Oppong, a resident of Abuakwaa, described mining in the forest as “a curse” for the community, noting how streams and rivers in and around the forest, including the Oda River, became contaminated by the spurt in mining activity since 2018.
Mercury is widely available in Ghana, according to Human Rights Watch. Small-scale miners add mercury to the slurry of sand and soil they dig up. Mercury binds with the gold. Heating the amalgam expels toxic mercury vapors, leaving just the gold behind. Mercury-tainted wastewater is dumped in and around mining sites, polluting the land, rivers and lakes. More recent research shows the persistence of the mercury problem across Ghana’s mining sector.
“We have to buy water to survive,” Oppong said.
Mercury-poisoned water is also of little use for farms, including those growing cacao, an important source of livelihood for people in the region. Ghana is one of the world’s leading producers of cacao, the main ingredient in chocolate.
“Illegal mining has brought us many problems including people falling into abandoned mining pits and cocoa farms getting destroyed,” said Nana Yaw Aning II, the chief of Koboro, a community that abuts the Apamprama reserve.
The extractive industry has also brought violence to Apamprama and surrounding areas, residents said.
During the raid led by Ebenezer, a scuffle broke out between a forest officer and an illegal miner who attempted to push the officer into a mining pit before disappearing into the surrounding forest. Another RRU member fired two shots at the fleeing miner but missed.
Aning said that before the mining companies and miners came, his ancestors protected the forest. Now, he said, he fears entering it. In 2022, accompanied by a number of Koboro residents, he sought out miners working inside the reserve. He wanted to find out who had permitted the men to mine in the forest. Armed miners warned them not to come back.
Aning said he fears for the future of the forest. “In the very near future, there will be no trees in the forest,” he said “I feel pity for the unborn generations.”
Malavika Vyawahare contributed reporting.
Ghana hollows out forests and green protections to advance mining interests
Banner image: Tree, near the Oda River, Ghana. Image by aripeskoe2 via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Citation:
Saim, A. K. (2021). Mercury (Hg) use and pollution assessment of ASGM in Ghana: Challenges and strategies towards Hg reduction. Environmental Science and Pollution Research, 28(44), 61919-61928. doi:10.1007/s11356-021-16532-4
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