Structural Adjustment by Mohan Giles Milward Bob Brown Ed Zack-Williams Alfred B

Author:Mohan, Giles, Milward, Bob, Brown, Ed, Zack-Williams, Alfred B.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

More specifically this leads to the following environmental problems:

1 widening of river banks and loosening of soils;

2 removal of vegetation and overburden;

3 digging of deep trenches which damage rocks and cause subsidence;

4 plants of economic value are not collected;

5 contamination of rivers during beneficiation;

6 contamination of rivers by large work gangs and bank erosion.

Much of this mining is illegal and this has secondary effects. Not all of the galamsey mining takes place in remote areas. Newspaper articles show that it encroaches onto roads and residential areas. Indeed there were reports of people falling into open pits and dying. The lure of quick wealth has led to young men taking up mining instead of farming so that food production has decreased which has been exacerbated by an influx of miners from other areas of Ghana.

These operations have not been closely regulated for a number of reasons. First, the mines have been in place for hundreds of years and ‘There has never been a mine developed in Ghana which has not first been discovered by a native surface working’ (Minerals Commission 1991: 11). Given their role in prospecting, the larger mines do not wish to eradicate this tradition. Second, the concessions cover large areas and the mines are numerous and dispersed which makes them hard to monitor. Third, these operations are embedded in the local economy and entire communities benefit from their existence. Hence, monitoring and apprehension by local citizens are unlikely. Small-scale mining forms part of a huge semi-informal economy which is ‘part and parcel of an entire system of production, exchange and distribution around which particular forms of social and political relations are embedded’ (Chachage 1993: 89; Hollaway 1996). These ‘integral production systems’ are not ‘alternatives’ to the ‘formal’ economy because such dualisms (formal/informal) underestimate the complexity of African social formations in which a range of economic arrangements exist. Related to this is the fact that employment in SSM is large, though difficult to quantify precisely, which is a disincentive to regulate such activities and risk closing them.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.