Erstellt am: 29. 10. 2011 - 10:45 Uhr

The Human Cost of Gold

For months the price of gold has been on the rise, but all that is gold does not glitter. Reality Check takes a look at the lives and livelihoods of gold miners.

apa

Gold bars displayed at the Korean gold exchange in Seoul, South Korea, 21 July 2011. Photo: EPA/Jeon Heon-Kyun

Brigitte Reisenberger told me she doesn’t own any gold and wouldn’t buy any. So she’s obviously not one of the people who in recent months have been buying up gold as an investment, pushing the price of gold to new heights. Brigitte Reisenberger is one of the authors of "Schwarzbuch Gold: Gewinner und Verlierer im neuen Goldrausch". She has been to visit gold mines in South Africa and other countries and investigated the plight of the men who work in industrial scale gold mining as well as small scale miners. She has seen the lives they live. That’s why she doesn’t want to own any gold.

Greg Valerio

Checking for Oro Verde Gold, it's ecological. Photo: Greg Valerio

Greg Valerio describes himself as a jeweller and an activist pushing for fair trade in the jewellery industry.
He travels the world trying to help small scale mining communities get a fair deal that allows them to reap the benefits of their back-breaking work. He has visited small scale mining operations in the desert, in the savannah, in glacial regions, in the rainforest. Greg Valerio knows small-scale mining.

EFE/Raimundo Valentim

gold diggers on the banks of the river Juma, 453 km south of Manaos, capital of the Brazilian Amazonia. Photo:EFE/Raimundo Valentim

Felix Hruschka is a mining engineer and mineral economist. He too is an expert in small scale mining and is adviser to the Board of the Association of Responsible Mining and chair of the Joint Standards Sub-Committee for the Fairtrade and Fairmined Standard. His work as a consultant has taken him to different mining communities all over the world. He spent seven years in Peru where the laws have been changed to allow artisanal and small scale miners to "formalize", ie to become registered miners working within a legal framework that helps protect them from exploitation.

These are the people we hear from in this today's Saturday Reality Check special (12-13).