Drive an hour south of Kumasi, Ghana’s bustling second city, and before long the dense jungle gives way to denuded hills peppered with rickety timber frames. On every slope, gumbooted workers shovel the tawny earth down to muddy pools in the furrows, from whence the sludge is pumped to the frame’s zenith to gush down a shallow ramp lined with webbed plastic matting. At the base, more workers sweep the outflow with metal detectors.
Several times a day, the incessant din of diesel engines pauses while the mats are delicately removed and placed in outsize tubs for washing. It’s only then that the glistening purpose of this toil materializes through the murky soup: gold—tiny flecks, yet with global prices breaching a record high of $4,000 an ounce, valuable enough to render any other labor foolish by comparison.
“I’ve worked galamsey for 15 years,” says dad of five Steven, using the local term for wildcat gold mining, as he rests wearily on his shovel. His work here earns 1,000 Ghanaian cedis ($81) each week, he says, or eight times the national minimum wage, “I also work as a driver and grow plantain, cassava, and coconut on my family farm. But the money here is so much better.”
Profitable, but illegal—which is why Steven requested TIME use only one name. Yet galamsey is no secret in Ghana, whose colonial name “Gold Coast” offers some measure of how this precious metal has long been interwoven with people’s lives. Early Arab traders exulted in the extravagance of the Asante court in Kumasi, including royal guard dogs adorned in gold collars and officials whose wrists were hung with nuggets so large they had to be supported by boy attendants.
Today, Ghana remains Africa’s top gold exporter and sixth largest globally. In recent years, however, what should be a boon has become spiked with burden. Independent of commercial mining operations, thousands of galamsey sites dot the emerald countryside of this West African nation of 34 million. But to isolate gold, galamsey workers typically use poisonous mercury, which pollutes drinking water and farmland and has been linked to serious illness and birth defects.
When Ghanaian President John Mahama returned to power in January, he made fighting galamsey a signature policy. He banned foreigners from trading gold inside Ghana to crack down on smuggling networks and established a state regulator, GoldBod, to streamline revenue and supply chains. New police patrols raid illegal mines and seize equipment.
Still, “it’s a complicated fight,” Mahama tells TIME in his Accra office, highlighting that more than 1.5 million Ghanaians work in galamsey. “So there’s also an issue of livelihoods. If you just stop them, what alternatives are you giving?”
Ghana’s struggles are mirrored across the developing world, where sky-high commodity prices are warping livelihood choices by incentivizing illicit mineral extraction with little heed to environmental or social concerns. In Brazil, wildcat gold mining degrades the Amazon rainforest and imperils Indigenous groups. In Indonesia, Chinese-backed illegal gold mines are polluting arable land with cyanide. And in Sudan, access to gold reserves is one of the major drivers of a civil war that the U.N. has dubbed the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, having so far killed 150,000 people and forced 12 million more from their homes.
Geopolitics is fueling this new gold rush. Much of global demand comes from China, which is stockpiling gold to reduce reliance on the U.S. dollar, develop the means to influence the international monetary system, and shield itself from potential U.S. punitive measures. Last year, the People’s Bank of China covertly bought 630 tons of gold, and it has now accumulated more than twice the 2,530 tons that it officially declares, according to Money Metals analyst Jan Nieuwenhuijs. China’s voracious appetite for gold has contributed to a spike in illicit gold mining across the Global South, prompting the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) to warn in May that organized crime in gold supply chains posed a “serious global threat.” (Some 50,000 illegal Chinese gold prospectors are believed to work in Ghana alone.)
But China’s superpower rival is also playing a part. The Trump Administration’s tariff war sent markets reeling and investors around the globe buying gold as a hedge. In addition, recent cuts to U.S. foreign aid—the $12.7 billion slashed from sub-Saharan Africa includes $156 million to Ghana—means governments are scurrying to plug the funding gap.
Mineral wealth such as gold offers one solution—though diverting labor and resources from more sustainable industries could prove catastrophic if prices suddenly drop. The hope for gold-producing nations like Ghana is to responsibly leverage this bountiful natural resource without falling prey to environmental degradation and civil strife. “When gold prices are that attractive, it creates an El Dorado effect,” says Mahama. “So it’s a blessing and a curse.”
The conquistadors may have obsessed over El Dorado, but Ghana’s historic kingdom of Asante makes the mythical land feel a little drab by comparison. West Africans have been extracting gold since the 10th century, and when British colonizers arrived they found young officers bedecked in leopard skins and brandishing gold-handled swords often adorned by a life-size ram’s head of solid gold. The most sacred symbol in Asante culture remains the Golden Stool, which according to lore was conjured down from the heavens and symbolizes not only royal authority but also the people’s collective soul.
Gold remained a lifeblood of the nation into modern times. But following independence in 1957, Ghana’s gold sector underwent a process of nationalization whereby underinvestment, mismanagement, and stagnant prices pushed it into steady decline. Production plunged from more than 28.5 tons in 1964 to just 6.8 by 1983 as Ghana fell out of the top 10 global producers for the first time.
By the mid-1980s Ghana was liberalizing its gold industry, and today foreign ownership is above 90%, with the biggest players Australian, Canadian, Chinese, and American firms—specifically Colorado-based Newmont, the world’s biggest gold producer and among Ghana’s top taxpayers. But in addition to liberalizing large-scale gold production, Ghana also legalized small-scale mining, which rose from just 5% of total output in 1991 to nearly 40% today. However, lax regulation meant the distinction between legal artisanal mining and illegal, destructive galamsey became increasingly blurred. But along with ready cash, the laissez-faire approach brought the banes of corruption, criminal infiltration, and rampant pollution.
A half-hour drive from Steven’s galamsey mine, Sicilia Frimpong, 45, lives in a mud-brick house with a rusting iron roof next to her family’s 30 acres of cocoa trees. But the adjacent plot straddling the riverbed has been taken over by galamsey workers after her brother leased his land to an Asian businessman. “I’m very angry with my brother,” she tells TIME, sitting on her stoop. “I’m worried about my kids, but what can we do? Pollution from galamsey is like mosquitoes,” she shrugs. “It’s just something you have to live with.”
Last year, hundreds of demonstrators took to the streets of Ghana’s sprawling capital Accra to demand the government take action, with hashtags #stopgalamseynow and #freethecitizens proliferating on social media. Some protesters brandished bottles of contaminated water from drinking wells. Dozens were arrested by police on charges of holding an illegal gathering but released after public outrage to their detention grew.
In an interview with local radio, George Manful, a former senior official in Ghana’s Environmental Protection Agency, highlighted that mercury can stay in waterways for 1,000 years and affects the entire food chain by accumulating in crops, livestock, and fish. “The water in these rivers is so turbid that it is undrinkable,” he said. “We are slowly poisoning ourselves.”
Mahama calls this unacceptable. He came to power aiming to tweak the regulatory dial back to harness more of Ghana’s gold wealth without casting a pall over the industry. The most radical change has been the launch of GoldBod, which sets gold prices, issues licenses to domestic traders, provides equipment and training to artisanal miners, and is the only entity allowed to sell gold for export. However, being both regulator and commercial arm entails “structural conflicts,” says Bright Simons, head of research at the IMANI Centre for Policy and Education, an Accra-based think tank. He points to how GoldBod’s remit to prevent illicit gold from entering the market “is in tension” with its role sourcing as much gold as possible to maximize state revenues. “It’s a really unwieldy beast in that regard.”
Mahama plays down any conflict, pointing to recent arrests of foreign gold smugglers while official gold exports almost doubled year-over-year to $5.1 billion during the first six months of 2025. Meanwhile, the gold reserves of Ghana’s central bank reached a record high of 39.7 tons in August 2025—a fourfold increase in just two years—helping the Ghanaian cedi strengthen 30% since he took power to assuage a cost-of-living crisis.
Law enforcement is bolder too. Previously, foreign nationals caught illegally trading in gold were simply deported. However, 10 Chinese nationals were arrested in July for illegal gold trading, and if convicted “they’ll be imprisoned in Ghana,” says GoldBod spokesman Prince Kwame Minkah resolutely. “We are moving heaven and earth so that they dance to the music of Ghanaian law.”
Mahama also wants his country to reap more of the downstream benefits of gold. In August 2024, Ghana opened its first commercial gold refinery and hopes to become only the second nation on the continent after South Africa to have a refinery certified by the benchmark London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) Good Delivery List—a credential necessary to access the world’s largest gold market in the U.K. capital, which trades some $165 billion worth of the yellow metal every day. “There’s no fast track when it comes to meeting these standards,” LBMA CEO Ruth Crowell tells TIME in her London office. “They need to do the work … but it is promising.”
The cuts to U.S. aid add pressure as well. Rolf Olson, acting chargé d’affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Ghana, insists that reorienting “away from aid and toward investment and commercial partnerships … is in the best interests of both the U.S. and African nations, including Ghana.”
Still, the trade-over-aid pitch might be more persuasive had the U.S. not just slapped a 15% tariff on Ghana’s exports. For Mahama, Washington’s mercantilist tilt “takes away U.S. soft power. Everybody is looking for opportunities in Africa, so it just makes Africa pivot to other countries that are willing to cooperate with us.”
And not just China. In July, Narendra Modi arrived in Ghana for the first visit by an Indian Prime Minister in 30 years, and just days later London Mayor Sadiq Khan came to Accra as part of the first-ever African trade mission by a holder of his office. Speaking to TIME, Khan explicitly cited the Trump Administration’s nativist turn as an opportunity for the U.K. “It’s really important to recognize that by providing a helping hand to those in the Global South, in the future there’s a better chance of doing trade with these countries.”
Yet the reality is that the U.S. isn’t shunning the Global South wholesale but becoming more selective and transactional—with minerals often a decisive factor. President Donald Trump’s desire to broker an end to the three-decade conflict between the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Rwanda seemed like an odd priority until he revealed that the U.S. would receive “a lot of mineral rights” from the DRC as part of June’s peace deal, with the implicit understanding that these would be granted at Beijing’s expense.
In November, Chinese defense and industrial giant Norinco was blocked from buying DRC copper and cobalt mine Chemaf despite the sale having been agreed on for months. In August, the U.S. sanctioned two Hong Kong–based firms for illegal mining in the country. Some 60 tons of gold worth $7 billion is smuggled annually out of the DRC, whose government hopes U.S. investment and security can help wrest back control of enormous deposits from rebel groups, including those aligned with the Islamic State. “The U.S. and DRC are building stronger ties all the time,” says Charlie Chase-Gardener, co-CEO of Horizon Corp., a London-based mining-investment firm with projects in both countries.
It’s another example of how gold production is increasingly a battleground. Gold has been a prized asset for over 5,000 years and today is seen as a hedge against inflation, currency devaluation, and geopolitical shocks. Global demand rose to a record 5,483 tons in 2024, driven by increased mine output and recycling. As legendary financier J.P. Morgan put it: “Gold is money; everything else is debt.”
Central banks have been on a gold-buying spree, snapping up over 1,000 tons of the metal for the third straight year in 2024. “Central banks are holding gold because it’s a diversification away from the U.S. dollar, partly as the U.S. role in the global economy and geopolitics has fundamentally changed with the latest Administration,” says Crowell.
Over the past few years, Beijing has been shedding U.S. Treasury bills and buying gold, whose untraceable and fungible characteristics offer many of the benefits of modern crypto-currencies. While the LBMA sets the globally recognized benchmark gold price, so much of the action has shifted to China these days that insiders whisper that the true global standard is set 5,700 miles east of London in Shanghai.
Gold’s utility also has soared with recent U.S. sanctions on Russia and Iran, providing a way for pariahs to trade outside the dollar-denominated financial system. China uses gold to buy oil from Saudi Arabia, building enormous gold vaults in Hong Kong and Riyadh that facilitate gold-backed transactions without the physical movement of bullion.
China itself is the world’s biggest gold producer, refining 418 tons last year, and is also the top purchaser, importing 1,350 tons over the same period. Meanwhile, Beijing forbids any export of gold without a special license, spurring analysts to conclude that the official figure of 2,530 tons held by the People’s Bank of China is farcically low. “There’s no way that’s real,” says Quentin Mai, CEO of West Point Gold, a Vancouver-based mining company. “There’s something going on there that no one’s been able to figure out.”
One theory is that Beijing is secretly stockpiling gold in case relations with the U.S. spiral. By suddenly disclosing its true holdings, China could drive up gold prices while signaling stronger backing for the renminbi, thus weakening the dollar’s global clout.
Whatever the reason, the U.S. is concerned and making its own moves to secure gold reserves. In March, Trump issued an Executive Order to declare gold a critical mineral—a category deemed essential for national security and economic prosperity—which should help fast-track permitting of new domestic gold mines. (The U.S. ranks fifth in global gold production.)
Ensuring responsible sourcing is a major headache given how easily illicit gold can be disguised as recycled bullion or jewelry. Beyond setting the global gold price, the LBMA is charged with overseeing the transparency and sustainability of supply chains via its Good Delivery List, which has 66 certified gold refineries around the world. Yet several refiners have been delisted in recent years, and in April last year the NGO Swissaid wrote an open letter saying that “many” LBMA refiners continue to be linked to money laundering, land and water pollution, or human-rights abuses.
Crowell insists that the LBMA’s systems of reporting and audits are “not a guarantee” but “a strong measure and a strong stick.”
“There’s still an enormous amount of gold that funds conflict,” she says. “We put the controls in place, but it doesn’t mean that the gold doesn’t get sold somewhere as long as other centers are happy to turn a blind eye.”
Nestled in Dubai’s Deira district, the city’s Gold Souk is reputed to be the largest and cheapest gold market in the world. Back in the early 1900s, before the United Arab Emirates was even a country, merchants from India and Iran began hawking gems and precious metals by the twisting waterway known as Dubai Creek. Today, more than 500 stores line the Gold Souk’s narrow alleys, crammed with pearls, platinum rings, silver earrings, and diamond-encrusted necklaces—as well as its namesake yellow metal, which can be bought as jewelry, coins, or biscuits.
Traders at Dubai Gold Souk insist their wares are responsibly sourced. But the numbers tell a different story. According to a Swissaid report last year, some 40% of all African gold exports are undeclared, of which 93% goes to the UAE.
The UAE’s alleged role in laundering gold is nothing new. In 2016, the UAE declared gold imports worth $7.4 billion from 25 African countries that had not declared any exports to the UAE, according to analysis by Reuters. The UAE also declared an additional $3.9 billion more in gold from the 21 other source countries than was declared in their exports.
It’s a no-questions-asked approach that has cast the UAE as a key player in the civil war in Sudan. The conflict erupted in April 2023 when a vicious power struggle boiled over between leaders of Sudan’s armed forces and its powerful Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group. But the war is also a proxy conflict between Middle East rivals, with Qatar and Iran major backers of the Sudanese government, and the UAE, despite its denials, accused by U.N. sanctions monitors of bankrolling the RSF.
Sudan has a storied tradition of gold mining. The territory’s northern civilization of Nubia supplied much of the gold for ancient Babylon and Egypt, including for Tutankhamen’s tomb. Gold is still the top commodity of Sudan, accounting for 70% of exports, with a record 70 tons worth $1.57 billion shipped in 2024. But a comparable amount is also smuggled out via Chad, the Central African Republic, Ethiopia, and Egypt—nearly all destined for the UAE.
In addition, Russia’s Wagner militia is also heavily involved in the trade, helping funnel some $2.5 billion of African gold to Vladimir Putin’s war of choice in Ukraine, according to the 2023 Blood Gold Report. Both sides have been fighting mercilessly over Sudanese gold mines.
“Minerals and gold in particular are exacerbating the war,” says Muhammad Hassan, a Sudanese former aid worker in the Darfur region who has fled to Ethiopia. “These things are very visible.”
The quest for nations that produce gold is to ensure it serves as a stabilizing rather than disruptive influence—and for ordinary people to harness the benefits.
Working alongside Steven in Ghana, 21-year-old Sarah had been doing galamsey for only a week when TIME visited and says she intends to use her earnings to put herself through tailoring college. “The money is good, but I don’t want to do this forever,” she says. “Hopefully I can make a good living from dressmaking.”
As Sarah speaks, the tiny splatters of yellow mud on her face catch the afternoon sun, making it seem for a moment as if she herself has been lightly gilded. Perhaps one more symptom of a gold fever sweeping the earth.
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