Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Melusi Nkomo
(Princeton University)
Muriel Côte (Lund University)
Timothy Raeymaekers (University of Bologna)
Joseph Mujere (University of York)
Send message to Convenors
- Chair:
-
Joseph Mujere
(University of York)
- Discussants:
-
Muriel Côte
(Lund University)
Melusi Nkomo (Princeton University)
- Format:
- Panel
- Streams:
- Environment and Geography (x) Inequality (y)
- Location:
- Philosophikum, S57
- Sessions:
- Friday 2 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
Short Abstract:
This panel invites submissions on artisanal and small-scale mining labour in Africa. Taking mining labour as a political process, the panel aims to highlight its significance in the socio-spatial processes of class formation and differentiation in contemporary African society.
Long Abstract:
The panel focuses on artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) labour in Africa. ASM as an activity is however problematic – much of the literature has focused on the chemical pollution, land degradation, socioeconomic exploitation, tax evasion, which pervade ASM. These issues have often been analysed through the prism of the link between ASM and rural development; urban transformation; sustainable livelihoods. What is missing, or only marginal, is a focused discussion on ASM labour that may help us account for dynamics of class formation and differentiation (Bryceson and Geenen 2016; Verbrugge and Besmanos 2016). This lens is useful in overcoming for example the problematic dichotomies in the analysis of African extractive economies, between large-scale mining and ASM (which are often wrongfully perceived as separate forms of, ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ capitalist development) (Luning 2014; Côte and Korf 2018). It may also shed light on the active making, remaking, and unmaking of ASM labour in Africa, as it plays out in kin, household and community relations, in beliefs, social organizations, work relationships, and the many other arenas of life that straddle, rather than oppose, economic domains (Mezzadri 2019; 2021).
As we are using it, labour involves multiple engagements with capital and state as well as relationships with other forms of socio-economic activity that play out locally, regionally, and globally (Kasmir and Carbonella 2014, 7). What power-laden relations and interactions are involved in the making of extractive ASM labour in Africa, and how do these help us understand how ASM labour is valued, in capitalistic terms and otherwise? How do these processes play out on the ground, in mining sites, but also in further away sites of ASM labour governance and formalisation, as well as along mineral supply chain relations? How are the processes of labour reproduction, subsumption, and exploitation embedded socially, politically, and spatially? How do various uncertainties in ASM affect labour and socio-spatial relations? How do the multiple social relations, networks, and processes that facilitate ASM extractive labour impact upon the transformation of social spaces (e.g. the village, the town, the home)? How are the boundaries between extractive labour, capital, and resources reproduced and negotiated?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 2 June, 2023, -Muriel Champy (Aix-Marseille Université)
Paper short abstract:
This contribution demonstrates that formal and informal, legal and illegal, small-scale and large-scall gold mining form a continuum. Instead of looking at different mining techniques in terms of legality, they are analyzed in terms of social acceptability and contribution to local development.
Paper long abstract:
While Côte d’Ivoire historically relied on the plantation economy, its gold mining sector has grown very rapidly in recent years. In this new economic configuration, the government encourages industrial gold mining, officially the main contributor to the country’s GDP in this sector, and actively fights artisanal extraction through law enforcement. Nonetheless, over a million people make a living in the artisanal and small-scale gold mining sector (ASM), in contrast to the pyramidal organization of a dozen industrial and mostly foreign mining companies.
It has already been shown (Capitant, Côte & Zongo, 2022) that industrial mines usually settle in former artisanal mining sites, forcing already established artisanal workers to reorganize their activity elsewhere, before another company understands the land they exploit is profitable and pushes them to move to yet new territories. It is if large-scale mining companies subcontracted mining prospecting and the groundwork for establishing the local acceptance of this activity to ASM.
On a local level, gold diggers specialized in the exploration of abandoned wells, an activity designated as “topo” or “kamikaze”, are often the discoverers of new gold veins. Even though their activity is framed as theft, artisanal gold diggers consider they have a pioneer role in the implantation of the informal sector.
This contribution demonstrates that formal and informal, legal and illegal, small-scale and large-scall gold mining form a continuum. Instead of looking at different mining techniques in terms of legality, they should be analyzed in terms of social acceptability and contribution to local development.
Enrico Ille (University of Leipzig) Mohamed Salah Abdelrahman (IRD)
Paper short abstract:
We think here through the implications of a prevailing arrangement in Sudan's gold mining sector where tailing businesses using cyanide acquire tailings from artisanal mining after mercury processing with no or very low payment, thereby avoiding the costs of labour needed to produce such tailings.
Paper long abstract:
Sudan has experienced since 2008 a massive shift to gold mining as livelihood strategy. The gold rush remained almost exclusively driven by artisanal mining for several years, as most deposits did not appear economically profitable for industrial mines. Only around 2013, an alternative approach for mid- to large-scale companies emerged in form of the tailing business. It is based on the different efficiency of extracting gold from ore using mercury and cyanide, respectively. Companies started to procure tailings from mercury processing and treat them with cyanide. Although generally part of market exchanges, the tailings were often acquired from local authorities with very low or no cost to the business owners, which means that the labour that created such tailings remained unpaid. We think here through the implications of avoiding implicit labour costs in relation to the payment structure at work in Sudan's gold mining sector in general, highlighting how these dynamics show not only an essential intertwining of conventionally compartmentalized or antagonized sectors – artisanal and industrial – but how the latter, in case of the tailing business, owed its existence and profitability to the former, without any kind of remuneration. This ongoing relation throws a light on the future of labour relations and class formation in Sudan that does not only concern issues of fair payment but invisible implicit costs – economic, environmental, political – that need to be made perceptible in order to even start addressing them, a process that is often made problematic and politicized in itself.
Benjamin Kwao (Trinity College Dublin)
Paper short abstract:
Using labour control regimes and social reproduction as an analytical framework, this paper sheds light on how the labour processes in ASM contribute to class formation and differentiation.
Paper long abstract:
Despite the expanse of studies on artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) in Africa, discussions on how labour processes work in the sector remain limited in the literature. Using labour control regimes and social reproduction as an analytical framework, this paper sheds light on how the labour processes in ASM contribute to class formation and differentiation. It is revealed that the ASM sector in Ghana is an ‘unregulated space’ that facilitates class struggle and competition for capitalist accumulation. Despite being a largely ‘unregulated space’, successful participation in ASM in Ghana is mediated by relations with powerful elites, including political actors. The use of the risk and profit-sharing strategy, where the earnings of workers are tied to the profitability of the extracted gold ore, ensures the integration of miners into the production system and creates a sense of inclusion in the extractive process. In addition to integrating workers, the risk and profit-sharing strategy is recognised as a tool for labour control that facilitates workers’ exploitation in favour of surplus accumulation for the powerful elites. The paper shows how labour relations and outcomes in ASM have been shaped and are continually influenced by cultural and historical legacies that predate colonialism.
Papa Sow (Nordic Africa institute)
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyzes the relationship between speculations on the environment (floods, runoff, dumping), migrations, and technology (moving objects) and the health of workers in salt mines in West Africa. Senegal, Niger, Gambia and the Benin Republic are the chosen study countries.
Paper long abstract:
This paper, extracted from surveys carried out as part of a research project, analyses the links between salt extraction (science-society, development, and environment), migration and health in West Africa. Senegal, Niger, Gambia and the Benin Republic are the chosen study countries. The objective is to follow the trajectories of natives and migrant workers in the salt mines, but also to study their living and working conditions. The study is based on qualitative and quantitative empirical research in these four countries in West Africa. The research followed individuals, communities, households and focused on the processes of development, natural/environmental and social transformation that are currently taking place in these salt mines. The first trends of the results show that migrants are often an essential component of the exploitation of salt mines in West Africa, and exploiting salt represents for them a living. Alongside the migratory phenomenon, there are the various environmental speculations (often created voluntarily) which pollute the salt mines, and thus contribute to cut lots of jobs among the many salt workers, hence showing high levels of engaged or disputed responsibilities. The study shows the main diseases caused by salt mining, the stigmas and beliefs around these diseases, but also the main arguments that led to a strong reluctance to use iodine among "salt collectors" and consumers. These discourses on iodine, but also on own created "environmental pollution" are also interesting to elucidate, understand and analyze.
Maxime Ndanyuzwe Rushemuka (Lund University)
Paper short abstract:
This conceptual study explores an alternative reading of the exploitation of workers in artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) and the marginalisation of this sector by applying a labour regime analysis to this activity. It also discusses the implications of this insight for future research on ASM.
Paper long abstract:
The boom of artisanal and small-scale mining in regions of the global south, including in Sub-Saharan Africa correlated with the loss of formal employments, and diminishing agriculture productivity presumably due to structural adjustment programs which led to the reduction of state assistance to small farmers. For the practitioners and researchers of rural development who were increasingly familiar with the concept of livelihoods, it almost came as intuitive to conceptualize this expanding activity as alternative livelihood to agriculture. In the 2000s, artisanal miners started to be portrayed as producers of global commodities due to campaigns of NGOs, and transnational civil societies on issues such as conflict minerals from ASM, which established the responsibilities of global actors in the governance of global minerals supply chains. ASM social science research mostly evolved around these two conceptualizations of the sector, namely as “alternative livelihood” and/or “informal producers of global mineral commodity”. The debates building on the two narratives focused respectively on national and sub-national impacts of policy process on ASM livelihood, and on the challenges and inequality in the governance of global value chains. What seems to lack in this research is the consideration of ASM as a field of work and the theorization on its regulation. In this study, I suggest that the concept of labour regime, applied elsewhere, has the potential of explaining the format in which policy regulations and governance norms get institutionalized through the project of controlling ASM workers, but also through their resistance to control.