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.