Farmers' perception of the impact of gold mining on shrinking agricultural land and their livelihood in the Asutifi-North District

Abstract

Gold mining has contributed significantly to Ghana's economy and has since been extracted by both large-scale industrial miners as well as illegal artisanal and small-scale miners (ASGM). Despite its employment generation and national income contribution, gold mining has emerged as the major competitor to agriculture in terms of land use with devastating environmental effects. Consequently, there has been a surge in the practice of ASGM in Ghana over the years, particularly in the Asutifi-North District where NGGL is operational. This has led to shrinking agricultural land due to increasing ASGM in the District. Yet the complexities surrounding the symbiosis between large-scale mining, ASGM and agriculture remain unstudied. Additionally, understanding the perception of farmers on gold mining and what motivates farmers to venture into ASGM amidst farming remains unclear. In this work, we used both descriptive statistics and principal component factor analysis to examine the complexities surrounding large-scale mining, ASGM, and agriculture, and farmers' perception of mining. Multi-staged sampling comprising both purposive and random sampling techniques was employed, questionnaires were administered to 300 farmers and 5 key stakeholders were interviewed from 5 mining communities in the district. Results indicate that mining is the biggest competitor to farming in terms of land use and the increase in land lease to the large-scale gold mining firm (NGGL) over the years has resulted in to increase in illegal artisanal gold mining. Additionally, the result from the principal component factor analysis showed that among several reasons, a farmer's livelihood constitutes the single most important reason that compels farmers to venture into ASGM with a scale reliability coefficient (Cronbach's α) of 0.6276.