YOHO, Ivory Coast – (Reuters) – A month ago, Bouafu Kouassi dug a neat circular hole in the middle of his one-hectare cocoa plantation in western Ivory Coast, and, sifting through the gravel on his shovel, found the unmistakable traces of gold dust.
With luck, it could transform his life, but it could just destroy his farm. And as the story repeats across the cocoa heartland of the world’s top producer and neighboring Ghana, the second-largest, it could do lasting damage to the industry.
Today, nearly three dozen vertical shafts plunge down into the soil beneath Kouassi’s cocoa trees, branching out into a web of underground tunnels 10 meters below the surface.
The 35-year-old, who once struggled to pay school fees for his five children, has in a matter of weeks pocketed as much as he could hope to earn in five years growing cocoa. “As long as there’s gold here, we’ll be working,” he says, with the giddy smile of a man who thinks he’s won the lottery. With high prices for the precious metal fuelling a gold rush in Ivory Coast and Ghana, diggers are scurrying to cash in.
But the drain on the labor market and the harm done to plantations could endanger cocoa production in the two nations, which account for 60 percent of global supply.
Kouassi says he is being careful, and his plantation will survive once the gold is exhausted, probably in just a few months, but a stark reminder of the risks lies just a short walk away.
Down a dirt track lies a scarred landscape of pits and mounds of brown-red dirt. There are no trees left here to block the sun that beats down on diggers balancing sacks of dirt on their heads and women wading waist-deep in muddy pools to wash gravel, their infant children tied to their backs.
After two months, gold output from the site is falling off, and many of the 300 shafts on the two-hectare plot have been abandoned as miners move on, leaving desolation in their wake. In some areas, diggers have begun using toxic cyanide and mercury to extract gold from the ore they mine.
Severin Konan, a cocoa farmer who manages the land for his family, is unapologetic. “You can make 100 million CFA francs ($212,000). And with that you sort yourself out. You head to the city. You don’t need your fields any more.”
PRISONERS OF POVERTY
In Ivory Coast, where artisanal mining has historically been concentrated in the arid north, diggers are moving into cocoa-growing areas around Issia, Duekoue, Zoukougbeu, Bouafle and Daloa – the latter producing a quarter of national cocoa output.
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