Men, women and even children in Zimbabwe are turning to small-scale gold mining, some of it illegal, as a last resort in the face of parched and empty maize fields.
In spite of the dangers, illustrated by two serious mine collapses this year, people have continued to arrive at riverbeds and disused mines hoping to extract enough of the precious metal to cover their basic food needs.
With no training or sophisticated equipment, miners pan or dig for long hours, for small returns.
A recent report by the feature service AfricaNews, said that up to 30% of the new miners were women, who saw their labour as a form of financial empowerment. They used the money for fertiliser, seeds, school uniforms or travel expenses. Worryingly, many of the miners were children.
The current rise in the number of small-scale miners reflects a similar trend seen during the severe drought of 1992.
Up to half of Zimbabwe’s 12 million people face food shortages in the coming months. This time the reasons go beyond drought, and include economic and political upheaval.
Zimbabwe’s controversial land-reform programme has also left hundreds of thousands of farmworkers and their families with an insecure future, and few alternative job opportunities.
“There has been an increase in small-scale miners, although government is trying to clamp down due to accidents and environmental degradation,” said Tinago Ruzive, president of the Associated Mineworkers Union of Zimbabwe.
The new miners come primarily from rural areas and tend to work either for licenced small mines, or move illegally through disused mines in search of traces of gold previous miners missed.
A study by the International Labour Organisation found that miners were paid poorly and lived in bad conditions. Some were paid on a “gwaza” basis, where they were remunerated according to how much rock they brought to the surface.
The study, by mining consultant John Hollaway, said small scale-mining had a “well established reputation for a disproportionately high number of fatalities”.
“This has arisen principally from the deaths caused by such miners re-entering closed mines illegally to win gold from the pillars, and from alluvial miners burrowing into uncompacted river banks,” he said.
In August, it was reported that between 20 and 30 people died when a mine shaft caved in in Mhondoro, southwest of the capital, Harare.
“We have seen a lot of small-scale panning primarily due to the serious collapse of the economy,” Munyaradzi Bidi, director of the human rights group ZimRights, told IRIN.
“Rural households are finding it difficult to cope, and the unemployment rate is very high. School leavers can’t find jobs, so illegal gold panning is seen as a way of finding a quick buck,” he said.
“They hope to sell the gold they find for basic commodities like oil and grain. They sell to buyers from as far afield as Botswana and South Africa, and to the elite in Zimbabwe.”
Bidi said the panners formed camps, and moved to new sites when they stopped finding gold, as they had no machinery to dig or blast.
However, ZimRights was concerned about the number of children panning.
“They have to fend for themselves and to subsidise the family budget for food and rations,” Bidi said. “We want them to go to school.”
He said that during the current food crisis, people were looking for any way to survive, and this included commercial sex work by some women at the camps.
He urged the government to formalise small-scale mining, and to introduce a welfare grant to help needy people.
Ruzive said the government was currently instituting training programmes for small-scale miners.
A spokesman for the Ministry of Mines was not immediately available for comment.