Galamsey: Ghana's illegal gold mining industry causes environmental destruction

Rivers have been polluted and forests destroyed on a shocking scale by illegal gold miners.

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Mercury is increasingly being used to extract gold by miners digging on a massive scale in forests and farms, degrading land and polluting rivers to such an extent that the charity WaterAid has called it "ecocide".

"I could actually paint with the water. It was so bad," Israel Derrick Apeti, better known as Enil Art, told the BBC.

He and his friend Jay Sterling visited the Pra River - around 200km (125 miles) west of the capital, Accra - to make a point about the environmental catastrophe unfolding because of "galamsey".

This is the term used by locals to describe the illegal mining taking place at thousands of sites around the country - including the forested regions famous for their cocoa farms, as well as their vast gold deposits.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn9dn8xq92jo

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