Artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) is a primarily informal sector that is increasingly coming into conflict with large-scale mining operations. RSK Africa Regional Environment and Social Director Jesper Jonsson believes that the situation will only get worse unless we explore more empathetic approaches focused on de-escalation between large and small-scale miners.
Predominantly in emerging economies, ASM ranges from a person panning in a river to a mining pit using compressors, generators and electrical drills. It is a sector rarely captured accurately in formal statistics, yet it involves millions of people and provides more than 80% of the world’s gemstones and up to 20% of the world’s gold production.
Conflict between ASM and large-scale industrial mining is not a new phenomenon. It can emerge when long-standing artisanal activity overlaps with newly allocated concessions, or from artisanal and small-scale miners moving into abandoned mine shafts or even into operational mines. In extreme cases, artisanal miners may be influenced or exploited by criminal elements.
Traditional approaches – particularly evictions – have tended to intensify tensions rather than resolve them, exposing concession owners to community backlash, legal action, media scrutiny and heightened environmental, social and governance (ESG) risk, with several high-profile cases having gone to court and resulted in costly settlements. These responses focus on symptoms rather than the underlying drivers of informality, leaving artisanal miners vulnerable and operators without durable solutions. With ESG a growing topic in the mining sector, especially for companies listed or financed internationally, a new focus on de-escalation and cooperation has a great many advantages.
Small and large-scale miners are not necessarily competing for the same deposits. Artisanal miners rarely work below 50–100 metres deep due to the complexity of managing oxygen and the need for dewatering. Mponeng Gold Mine near Johannesburg, by contrast, now reaches nearly 4000 metres deep. Where artisanal and small-scale miners are looking for high-value, close-to-surface deposits, large-scale mining companies typically focus on volume for long-term feasibility, including in lower-yield ore bodies. Theoretically, then, the two groups do not need to be in conflict and could instead cooperate and coexist.
One cooperative method we’ve seen tested is for ASM operators to be given mining access to an area on the concession. By providing a legal access area, it is less likely that ASM operators will be exploited by criminal elements, and this also helps build institutional arrangements where the concession owner has some control and influence over who can access the mines and how they mine. Additional support such as equipment loans or geological assessments or maps can help build trust between the two groups and create opportunities to improve health and safety, for example.
This, of course, requires an understanding of the set-up. Just because a sector is informal does not mean it is disorganised, and there can be strict internal roles with claim owners, drillers, ore carriers, buyers, service providers and more.
We’ve seen some mines incorporate this with offtake arrangements – a ‘promise to buy’ – for small-scale miners with a guaranteed minimum price. This means supply chains can be integrated and allows conditions to be set, such as forbidding the use of mercury for the extraction of gold. We know from baseline studies of supply chains that where gold is produced informally, mercury is often making its way in, causing pollution and poisoning those same informal workers, so this cooperation can have multiple benefits.
For concession owners and mine operators, cooperation does come with liability concerns, as a person mining in the concession is the owner’s responsibility. Health and safety problems, prevalent in small-scale mining, then become the concession owner’s health and safety problems; child labour becomes the owner’s child labour; accidents become their accidents. Waste dumps, as an example, are notoriously dangerous, and if the spills were to fall or slip, there is real risk of injury to the people on it.
It’s perhaps no surprise then that the traditional approach is aimed at removing the risk and liability of artisanal mining by providing alternative livelihoods for those people, often set up as part of support programmes or resettlement plans. This can work, but only if proper baseline studies are conducted that capture income patterns, household dependence, gender roles and seasonality, and if genuine effort to understand the people is made. As a Danish person, I often point to our dairy sector as proof of how a cooperative can work, but we know from experience that this doesn’t always translate across cultures and countries. Too often the miners’ earnings are underestimated, the viability of proposed alternative livelihoods is overestimated and there is a fundamental lack of understanding of the agency and entrepreneurial approach to many ASM operators. They may prefer being in smaller groups where they trust everyone instead of a cooperative set up by an NGO or a Western-run mining organisation.
While there is no single proven approach to this conflict, we know that evictions are not a solution, and we must try to forge a less confrontational approach underpinned by empathy; artisanal miners are hard-working people looking for a livelihood, no different than those who moved to Klondike or California in the gold rushes of the 1800s. With the price of gold passing $5000 per ounce now, the conflict between small-scale and large-scale mining will only worsen if we do not.
