- The Ghanaian government has significantly ramped up the approval of mining permits under legislation passed in late 2022, intensifying concerns about runaway environmental damage.
- The country is already the top gold producer in Africa, but much of the mining is done in forest reserves and other biodiverse ecosystems.
- The government has long cracked down on artisanal illegal gold miners, but activists say the real damage is being wrought by industrial operations, both legal and illegal.
- A debt default in 2022 has seen Ghana lean even more heavily on its gold to mitigate the crisis, prompting warnings that such a policy is neither economically nor environmentally sustainable.
In 2022, the West African nation of Ghana lost 18,000 hectares, or 44,500 acres, of forests — an area the size of 30,000 football fields.
But instead of strengthening restrictions, that November, the Ghanaian government decided to further expose the country’s protected woodlands to the corrosive effects of mineral extraction. The legislative changes allowed mining in critical biodiversity areas, relaxed rules for obtaining exploitation permits, and opened the door to more mining in forest reserves.
Even before the measure was passed, many of Ghana’s protected forests were exposed. Environmental campaigners had been advocating for curbing mining in these reserves altogether. The country has fought a highly publicized battle against small-scale artisanal miners, known as galamsey, yet the effects of industrial-scale mineral extraction have gone largely ignored.
Between 2000 and 2019, industrial mining was the leading cause of forest loss in Ghana, putting it in the same category as countries like Indonesia and Brazil, which have vastly larger forest areas.
According to a Mongabay analysis of data from Ghana’s Mineral Commission, 200 active mining licenses already overlap with forest reserves in Ghana, three-quarters of which are industrial permits. These impact more than a third of the country’s 266 reserves.
Since passing the legislative order LI 2462 in November 2022, Ghana has doled out mining permits at a record pace. Environmentalists say they fear forests are at greater risk than ever. “It is very retrogressive,” Daryl Bosu, deputy director of the NGO A Rocha Ghana, told Mongabay. “This is not in alignment with our push for excluding mining from all forest reserves eventually.”
The legacy of Heritage Imperial Company Limited
The threat to forested areas by mining can be gauged from the state of the Apamprama reserve in Ghana’s Ashanti region. A third of the forest, spread across 3,630 hectares (8,970 acres) in Amansie Central district, disappeared in just over 20 years. Most of the losses occurred in the past five years.
Asante Richard, a local representative of Abuakwaa, one of the administrative regions where Apamprama falls, said illegal mining has been happening in the forest since 2015, but a concession given to Heritage Imperial Company Limited sharply changed the situation, leading to massive destruction.
Heritage Imperial has held a license to prospect for gold inside the reserve since October 2018. This permit was converted into a full-fledged industrial mining license in June 2020. In April 2022, Heritage Imperial 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. Global Forest Watch data show a devastating spike in green cover loss starting in 2018.
Multiple people, including two former ministers, accuse the company of indulging in bulk mining activities even when it held only an exploration license. Erastus Asare Donkor, a Ghanaian journalist with Joy News who has spent years covering illicit extraction in the Apamprama reserve, alleged that the company, helmed by a Ghanaian, Donald Emmanuel Entsuah, is responsible for the destruction. It mined illegally inside the reserve and allowed foreigners, including Chinese nationals, to mine in its concessions with heavy equipment, according to Donkor.
“From 2018 to 2020, the man [Entsuah] destroyed our forest and stole our gold with no license,” Donkor said. “Fast-forward to 2023, and now the whole forest is almost gone.”
Heritage Imperial didn’t respond to requests for comment at the time of publishing.
Going after the ‘little fish’
For the longest time, the Ghanaian government’s fight against environmental ruin has centered on galamsey, or informal small-scale mining done without the state’s explicit permission by some of its most impoverished citizens. However, experts say this ignores the related, pervasive threat posed by large-scale extraction, both legal and illegal.
Jasper Abembia Ayelazuno, a social scientist at Ghana’s University for Development Studies, said the government continues to favor and encourage industrial mining while demonizing subsistence miners. The state’s fight against destructive mining is waged “against the little fish while the big fishes are left to thrive and to destroy the environment.”
But the traditional distinction between mining done by Ghanaians with rudimentary tools, on one hand, and large-scale mining by foreign companies, on the other, no longer holds, experts told Mongabay. The modern galamsey is more industrial or semi-industrial in nature because of greater mechanization.
“It is not your grandfather’s galamsey,” Ayelazuno said. “They are not your usual poor people digging for survival, but well-established, politically connected, rich people promoting mining to make more money.” A combination of state-sanctioned extraction and what Ayelazuno called “elite galamsey” is taking a toll on Ghana’s forests.
Large-scale mining is variously tangled up in forest wreckage, opening up access to virgin woodland and introducing more destructive machinery into the mix. New roads snake into the forest, excavators and bulldozers trample the terrain, water bodies are drained, disfigured and defiled. Transitory settlements spring up, filled with miners who feed off the surrounding woodland.
Donkor, the journalist, said companies like Heritage Imperial can destroy forests with impunity because they enjoy the protection of Ghana’s ruling elites.
In 2017, the newly elected government, led by Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, launched Operation Vanguard, a militarized operation targeted at galamsey. Akufo-Addo also set up the Inter-Ministerial Committee on Illegal Mining, chaired by then-environment minister Kwabena Frimpong-Boateng. A team, including Frimpong-Boateng, visited the Apamprama forest reserve in 2018 and confiscated equipment belonging to Heritage Imperial.
Frimpong-Boateng later alleged that the company was operating full-scale mining operations despite only having a prospecting license at the time. He recounted receiving a call from Gabby Otchere Darko, a nephew of President Akufo-Addo, while on site.
Darko, a co-founder of Africa Legal Associates, an Accra-based law firm, defended his role in the affair, saying he represented Heritage Imperial. “Lawyers are supposed to protect the legitimate business of their clients,” he said, adding that he was only seeking information about “why a legitimate company [with] all the licenses and permits required to do prospecting was being frustrated from doing their work.”
The controversy also brought scrutiny on Entsuah, the managing director of Heritage Imperial. According to Frimpong-Boateng, Entsuah is associated with companies with a history of violating mining permits. In an interview with local radio station CITI FM, the former minister cited the record of C&G Aleska Mining Company, another company promoted by Entsuah. In his report, Frimpong-Boateng raised the issue of permit owners allowing galamsey miners, both Ghanaians and foreign nationals, to operate in their concessions.
In 2021, President Akufo-Addo dissolved the inter-ministerial committee. In 2023, Frimpong-Boateng was arrested on corruption charges and later released on bail. Ayelazuno said the former minister was targeted for highlighting the role of politically connected players in the sector.
Mongabay couldn’t independently verify Frimpong-Boateng’s allegations. Entsuah didn’t respond to Mongabay’s requests for comment. In public statements, Entsuah has denied allegations against both C&G Aleska and Heritage Imperial.
‘National interest’
Environmental activists accuse the Ghanaian government of diluting laws and regulations it’s already failing to enforce. Ghana’s forest reserves were created to protect the country’s myriad forests, ecologically fragile areas and critical wildlife habitats after widespread alarm about forest loss at the start of the 20th century caused by familiar foes: timber extraction, cacao farming, and mining.
“The President may … give approval, in writing, to a mining company to undertake mining activities in a globally significant biodiversity area in the national interest,” the 2022 legislative order says.
The fear is that Apamprama’s fate will befall other forest reserves.
In the first six months of 2023 alone, the country’s Minerals Commission issued 12 new mining leases, more industrial exploitation permits than the previous two years combined. Between 2023 and May 2024, the number of permits granted was more than double that between 2021 and 2022.
Ghana has also given out industrial prospecting permits at a record pace. in the seven months between November 2023 and June 2024, more than three times the number of permits were issued than in the four years running from 2019 to 2022. Prospecting permits are the initial step towards securing authorization to exploit.
Most are for gold mining. Several are in ecologically sensitive areas, a Mongabay analysis showed. The highest number of large-scale mining concessions were issued for the Atewa Range, Neung South and Bowiye Range forest reserves.
Atewa is designated as a Globally Significant Biodiversity Area (GSBA) and an Important Bird Area. It’s one of just two forest reserves where upland evergreen forests can be found in Ghana, home to more than 1,000 plant species and 550 types of butterflies. Multiple companies hold concessions within Atewa: Xtra Gold Mining Limited, Golden Star Exploration Ghana Ltd., and Kibi Goldfields Limited. State-owned Ghana Integrated Aluminium Development Corporation has a license to mine bauxite here. There’s an ongoing campaign to block mining in this ecologically vibrant region.
Through this expansion in mining, Ghana isn’t seeking to shore up just gold revenues, said Bosu from A Rocha Ghana. It’s also attempting to exploit lithium deposits as the race for transition minerals heats up. Lithium mined in Ghana, like its gold, will likely be exported out of the African nation as raw metal or concentrate. Lithium is used to manufacture the batteries used in electric cars and renewable energy storage. Ghana issued seven lithium prospecting licenses between 2020 and 2023.
A Ghana Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) official told Africa Briefing the new regulation aimed to strengthen mining regulations. It “contained clear guidelines on mineral prospecting activities in reserves, how to enter a forest to construct an access route to mineral deposits, how to drill, and how to monitor such activities,” the official said.
In response to Mongabay’s questions, Samuel A. Jinapor, Ghana’s minister for lands and natural resources, said the legislative order is “well motivated.” He downplayed its importance by pointing to laws that protect Ghana’s forests.
But environmental campaigners say that legality isn’t the issue. “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.
‘Gold for oil,’ forests for gold?
Gold has always been central to the Ghanaian economy. Under British colonial rule, this West African nation was known as the Gold Coast.
In 2022, Ghana was the largest producer of gold in Africa, putting out 3.7 million ounces, or 105 metric tons. That same year, the country saw a jump in its industrial mining output, recording its highest ever production: 3.1 million ounces (88 metric tons) of gold.
But years of extraction of this precious metal have diminished the country in other ways: mutilating landscapes, destroying forests, polluting waterways, and degrading farmland.
The reliance on gold also helped drive the country into a debt crisis in 2022, the 17th time since its independence from the British.
The economy’s overdependence on primary commodities like gold and cacao and, in more recent years, oil has created a brittle economy, Isaac Abotebuno Akolgo, a political economist at Germany’s University of Bayreuth, told Mongabay. Ghana continues to export low-priced raw materials like cacao, gold and crude oil, while importing more expensive consumer and capital goods from other nations.
Despite being an oil producer, Ghana buys refined petroleum products on the international market (they are one of its principal imports). It doesn’t drill oil in sufficient quantities and doesn’t have the refining capacity to process the crude it does produce.
“It is not simply a question of global shocks like COVID or international wars or the government’s fiscal indiscipline,” Akolgo said of the debt crisis. “There are historical and structural problems at play.”
To finance its deficit, the government borrows domestically and from the international market at punishing terms. By the end of 2022, Ghana found itself unable to pay its foreign debtors and had barely enough forex reserves to fund a few months of imports.
In response to the debt crisis, the Ghanaian government resorted to what some call “desperate” measures. It turned to its gold to pay for much-needed petrol imports — a kind of barter system to hold on to its scarce forex reserves.
To get this gold, it ordered small-scale license holders to sell their gold to the government rather than on the international market, and to accept payment in Ghanaian cedis, not in foreign currency. It also directed large mining companies to sell 20% of their gold output to the state.
“It is symptomatic of governance failure, this tendency to fall back on natural resources,” Ayelazuno said. “A cash-strapped government just wants fast money. So it is turning to extractive industries.”
Akolgo, however, said Ghanaian leaders know natural resource extraction isn’t a solution. The country was shut out of international financial markets because of its economic woes, having defaulted on its debt payments and thus unable to get more loans on favorable terms.
“It is the very dependence on the gold and other primary commodities that is causing financial problems. To resort to it can only be a temporary measure,” Akolgo said. “It’s certainly not sustainable financially or for the environment.”
Akolgo said the move to use gold to bail out the economy would encourage gold mining in all its fatal forms. “But there’s no justification to destroy forest reserves in search of gold,” he said. “National interest should also include the interest of unborn generations.”
Awudu Salami Sulemana Yoda contributed reporting from Ghana.
Ghana’s government faces pushback in bid to mine biodiversity haven for bauxite
Banner image: Mining for gold near Kumasi, in Ghana’s Ashanti Region. Image by Élodie Toto for Mongabay.
Citations:
Giljum, S., Maus, V., Kuschnig, N., Luckeneder, S., Tost, M., Sonter, L. J., & Bebbington, A. J. (2022). A pantropical assessment of deforestation caused by industrial mining. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(38). doi:10.1073/pnas.2118273119
Amponsah, A., Nasare, L., Tom-Dery, D., & Baatuuwie, B. (2022). Land cover changes of Atewa Range Forest Reserve, a biodiversity hotspot in Ghana. Trees, Forests and People, 9, 100301. doi:10.1016/j.tfp.2022.100301
Abotebuno Akolgo, I. (2023). Ghana’s debt crisis and the political economy of financial dependence in Africa: History repeating itself? Development and Change, 54(5), 1264-1295. doi:10.1111/dech.12791
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