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
Small and large-scale miners are not necessarily competing for the same deposits.
ASM is a sector that involves millions of people.
a livelihood, no different from 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. n
POWER THAT PERFORMS. PRESSURE THAT LASTS.
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JUNE 2026 | www.modernminingmagazine.co.za MODERN MINING 39
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