Golden Opportunity
How the World Gold Council Schemes to Exploit Issues in Small-Scale Mining for Their Own Gain
January 20, 2025
The World Gold Council (WGC) is an organization set up to increase the profitability of its members: 32 of the top, multinational, billion-dollar large scale gold mining corporations (LSGM). Essentially, it’s a marketing firm with registered lobbyists that represents Big Gold. In November 2024, the WGC released a 50-page document titled, “Silence Is Golden: A Report on the Exploitation of Artisanal Gold Miners to Fund War, Terrorism and Organised Crime.” Artisanal small-scale gold mining (ASGM) is defined by the United Nations as “gold mining conducted by individuals or small enterprises with limited capital investment and production.” It encompasses a wide range of mining activities that aren’t easily summarized. Suffice it to say, ASGM miners enjoy nowhere near the cash or clout to contract a PR firm or paid lobbyists in Washington to defend their interests. Big Gold is Goliath, ASGM is David.
The WGC’s “Silence Is Golden” agenda (“report” is far too objective a term) is a campaign to enrich Big Gold at the expense of communities where ASGM occurs in regions of Africa, South America and Southeast Asia namely. It aims to: 1) distance Big Gold from mining-related harms they’ve committed by shifting focus onto ASGM; 2) create a moral and political panic to justify beefing up an international security regime to police ASGM; and 3) displace ASGM from the market. Not coincidentally, the price of gold is skyrocketing while the legitimacy of Big Gold remains fragile. Page 35 of “Silence Is Golden” states the following:
The violence and abuse facing ASGM, and the corresponding security threats arising from the illicit flows of profits from their exploitation, present the international community with a complex set of challenges. They include the humanitarian plight of vulnerable communities, social and environmental conditions for some of the least well protected workers, mercury poisoning of artisanal miners, deforestation, the reinforcement of the Russian military machine at war in Ukraine, the re-financing of terrorist groups and drug traffickers, and the diversification of organised crime….
Law enforcement needs to be expanded at scale. Sanctions need to be reinforced. Best practices in integrating ASGM communities need to be highlighted and extended, with incentives to support their formalisation. International coordination needs to be improved, and a single primary forum should be agreed for bringing together the otherwise siloed efforts to boost implementation and enforcement.
Jewelers and consumers who support ethical gold sourcing should be aware of the hidden, neocolonial agenda at the core of “Silence Is Golden.” The WGC employs a classic blame the victim, savior strategy to disguise its lust for dominating the ASGM market as a kind of humanitarian aid. They scapegoat ASGM as causing a cornucopia of issues that it is merely correlated with. Sex trafficking for instance. While ASGM and sex trafficking may co-occur, it’s laughable to say the former causes the latter. Not to mention, saying so stigmatizes women as victims. The report speciously claims that ASGM is a causal factor in terrorism, which isn’t true. Much has been written to refute and problematize this idea with requisite nuance. The real harms associated with ASGM, like use of the toxic metal mercury during the extraction process, must be contextualized within our wildly unequal global economic system. So many people are forced to take extreme measures to ensure their own survival while a minority elite freely exploits them. Our modern global order of haves and have-nots is the root cause of ASGM-related harms. This order is the product of war, resource theft, genocide and rape committed over centuries by the coordination of the wealthiest nations’ militaries with the elite owners of manufacturing and financial capital (that include Big Gold), against working, poor and indigenous people. Sadly, there’s nothing illegal about the inhumanity of this order and the endless pursuit of capital accumulation. It’s perfectly legal for AngloGold Ashanti to pay its CEO Alberto Calderon over $7 million in 2023 while paying its miners less than $9,000 a year. AngloGold Ashanti is a WGC member with origins as a United Kingdom colonizer company operating in Africa since the end of the 19th century.
“Silence Is Golden” posits that Russia’s accumulation of gold wealth is a threat to Western hegemony. This reinforces its case for an expanded Western-led global security state to consolidate control of the gold market while motivating the purchase of gold by governments, central banks and private investors to compete with Russia:
The violence artisanal gold miners suffer ranges from direct attacks and threats from the arms of governments or state sponsored mercenaries, most notably the Wagner Group, to abuse and exploitation from criminal gangs, bandits and – in cases of weak or fragile states – armed insurgents…. In some cases, hired mercenaries acting at arms-length on behalf of one or more governments are responsible for systematic human rights abuses. The most prolific is the Russian Wagner group, which was directly connected to the Kremlin in Moscow….
On the battlefields of Ukraine, as the struggle for control of territory hangs in the balance, it is noteworthy how little concerted political will there has been to halt the illicit flow of profits from the exploitation of gold resources in Africa into the Russian war machine.
Big Gold wields the power to influence national and global security apparatuses in the interest of their own profits. Look no further than the revolving door between the WGC, government, finance and private equity. Dominic Raab, the gentleman commissioned to produce “Silence Is Golden,” was formerly Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Joe Cavatoni, senior market strategist at WGC, was formerly the managing director at private equity firm BlackRock. Alberto Calderon, the CEO of WGC member company AngloGold Ashanti, once held senior leadership positions in both the national government of Colombia and the International Monetary Fund. These are but a few examples of many.
Elite alliances between government and business that cross national borders perpetuate disputes over land rights and resource ownership that subjugate frontline, rural and indigenous communities. So much can be said about the undemocratic, oligarchic relationships and systems that prop up the billion dollar gold trade. But the main objective of this article is to caution ethical jewelers and consumers about the WGC’s propaganda so our messages don’t become co-opted by a campaign that’s anathema to our values.
By invoking imagery of deforestation, water contamination and human suffering alongside imagery of gangs and violence, the “Silence Is Golden” narrative casts a long shadow over the whole of ASGM, framing Big Gold as more virtuous by comparison. That’s not to say ASGM miners are superior to Big Gold in every way, but comparing the suffering they’ve caused is the difference between a mountain and a molehill. The WGC would rather perpetuate amnesia around its actual origins than pay reparations to the humans and communities their members have exploited with dire consequences. It was the apartheid era in South Africa that spawned the WGC in 1987. At that time, Big Gold’s products were boycotted all over the world, including by the United States, owing to their collaboration with the apartheid regime.
“Silence Is Golden” draws equivalence between ASGM miners and gang members thus redirecting focus from social justice for ASGM mining communities and the environment to punishment for “bad actors.” Shaping the public’s perception with images of ASGM-linked criminality creates skepticism toward bottom-up initiatives that empower ASGM communities like Fairtrade and Fairmined certified gold. Fairtrade and Fairmined certifications help redistribute wealth, albeit modestly, by paying miners more for their work while supporting the implementation of sustainable practices. Not once does “Silence Is Golden” mention Fairmined or Fairtrade gold. Other terms noticeably absent from the document are “social justice,” “empowerment,” and “equality.”
This comes as no surprise. In advocating for an international security regime to police ASGM, the WGC brandishes its neocolonialist political orientation. Expanding their market share by displacing ASGM using punitive methods would retrench the socio-economic dynamics between multinational corporations based in rich countries and local and indigenous communities laboring in over-exploited low and middle income countries that existed during colonialism and that persist to this day. If the WGC were truly interested in the livelihoods of miners and environmental welfare, they wouldn’t solicit a criminalization approach to reform.
Negative effects result from criminalizing commodity markets.The best/worst example of this is the War on Drugs. Just last year, $1.2 trillion American tax dollars went toward funding international “counternarcotics” activities. That money was spread to countries throughout the world to police the drug trade and to fund intergovernmental bodies like the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). This “war” has been going on for over forty years and during that time drug-related deaths in the United States have continued to climb while indigenous communities have been devastated. In fact, “Silence Is Golden” even discusses how the War on Drugs is the root cause of gold laundering:
In the context of Latin America, [Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime]
noted that US law enforcement efforts against drugs had raised the costs and reduced the profitability of drug trafficking, with the ancillary effect that, during the 2000s, criminal groups associated with the drug trade sought out other opportunities in the illicit gold sector. Likewise, the fragmented, isolated and often remote geography of ASGM makes it easier for the criminal gangs to enter the market and then exercise coercive control. This strategic shift proved so profitable that, by 2016, the value of illegal gold exports surpassed that of cocaine exports from Colombia and Peru, the two largest cocaine producers in the world.
If drugs were legalized and regulated, they could be produced and consumed safely, the same way alcohol is today. If drugs were legalized, there wouldn’t be an incentive to launder money through gold. The WGC draws the opposite, counterintuitive conclusion and proposes enhancing the UNODC’s capacity for prosecuting gold laundering:
In this context, UNODC has offered a number of practical recommendations to bridge the enforcement gap, invoking the UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime and the UN Convention Against Corruption, to expand international cooperation to systematically gather data and information on the financial flows deriving from illicit gold and promote more rigorous and timely national judicial cooperation – across all international gold markets – in order to support the kind of investigations and prosecutions against high-level perpetrators, which could help to produce a material deterrent effect.
The War on Drugs persists despite its failure. It begs the question, who benefits from criminalizing commodities like drugs and gold?
It’s hard to imagine even more US tax dollars going toward the surveillance and punishment of ASGM when spending on healthcare, education and infrastructure is so sorely lacking. The imperialist agenda of the United States, with industry collaborators like Big Gold, directly siphons funding from social investment. The priorities of our political and industry “leaders” are the root cause of premature death for so many.
Ethical jewelers and conscious consumers have to do two things at once: acknowledge legitimate problems in the ASGM supply chain while rejecting faux solutions that are thinly disguised attempts to expand the LSGM frontier via neocolonialist systems of control, land and resource appropriation and the weaponization of human rights. We have to counterpose law enforcement strategies with humanist strategies that support workers and subsistence miners growing their income and social power. We have to follow the leadership and self-determination within indigenous and impacted communities to support mining initiatives they desire. Perhaps less mining is the most responsible of all. How much gold do people really need anyway?
