Artisanal mining (AM) is very topical with the developments in South Africa where their activities in closed mines and, in some cases in private or protected land have become problematic. While the topic has been topical for a while there is no real progress in appropriate policy and related instruments to effectively manage the activities of Artisanal miners. This is not a surprise as there is no common understanding of the problem nor is there sufficient political will to implement potential solutions to stem the proliferation of destructive artisanal mining.
Features of Artisanal mining:
Some commonly understood but not often acknowledged features of artisanal mining include:
- Artisanal mining is a poverty-driven activity that is proliferated by an absence of lower-risk alternative opportunities such as jobs in the agricultural, large-scale mining and manufacturing sectors.
- Artisanal miners are subsistence miners who tend to; use rudimentary low-productivity methods to mine, experimental methods with low success rates and generally cannot rehabilitate post-mining.
- In some areas it has become a normalised and cross-generational activity, where juveniles end up leaving school early to chase fortunes from the mines, with no reading, writing and comprehension skills, this weakens the possibility of re-skilling them for alternative opportunities of equal value.
- Artisanal mining in Southern Africa has become a cross-border problem, where migrants seek fortunes across borders. While it can be acknowledged that some cross-border actors become artisanal miners unintentionally, others actively pursue it as a primary option.
- Criminal agents have been known to take advantage of impoverished communities to get forced labour ( including women and children) for their activities.
- Closed mines often offer low-hanging opportunities for artisanal miners? due to several reasons:
i)?The existence of a mine at closure indicates a definite resource.
ii)?Mine closure is usually a function of a lack of economic viability or technical feasibility for large-scale mining. That may not necessarily be the case for smaller-scale operators with limited overheads.
iii) Mining methods like room and pillar and shrinkage stoping leave more residual value than others, and that residual value is sufficient for artisanal miners’ needs in the pillars.
iv)?Current commodity prices make mines that may have been closed due to viability issues at low gold prices a lot more attractive. Old workings may present technical challenges limiting large-scale operations, but these are low-hanging fruits for artisanal miners.
v)?The risk tolerance of artisanal miners is higher due to their desperation and
vi)?Artisanal miners tend to be concerned more about immediate needs than the long-term mineability of a mine.
- Opportunistic and maleficient agents tend to take advantage of artisanal mining activities because of the ability of gold to transfer value across borders without triggering money laundering and financing of terrorism alarms, this contributes to the transboundary nature of the problem of artisanal mining.
- In some countries, the activities of artisanal miners contribute between 7.5-20% of national foreign exchange earnings, the focus of regulation of the sector may not be on the key negative impacts of artisanal activities.
Commonly proposed solutions include:
- Collaboration of Large Scale Miners with Artisanal Miners in mining operations: While in theory, this may be viable in areas such as skills and technology transfer, conflicting priorities and lack of meaningful resources on the artisanal miner's side are often a hindrance to the collaboration.
- Formalisation of AM: No common understanding of what this means, it often translates to fiscal expansion for governments and a higher cost of operation for AM which leads to its failure.
- Criminalisation and subsequent prosecution of artisanal miners: This approach tends to increase the negative effects of ASM operations, often with concealment.
- Providing mechanisation options for artisanal miners eg Chinese small-scale equipment. While this eliminates the value-eroding impact of middlemen eg toll millers or sponsors, the limited scale of AM ?does not give them the capacity to address environmental damage, nor stop them from participating in illicit flows.
Conclusions and recommendations for future solutions
- Most policy interventions do not address the main problems that drive AM activity, poverty and AM will remain as long as poverty exists.
- Policymakers and academic researchers tend to oversimplify the nature of the problems fuelling and brought about by AM, hence, policies are half-baked. It needs to be acknowledged that managing AM is a wicked problem hence, the solutions have to be necessarily sophisticated.
- Governments may need to consider creating zones of controlled chaos (artisanal mining platforms/special economic zones) to create a culture of collaboration with AM, thus reducing negative impacts on communities and minimise conflict with large-scale mining operations
