About an hour before dawn, Lt Mahi Landry and his team of rangers find the illegal goldmine they’ve been looking for deep in Téné forest, in south-central Ivory Coast.
It has been raining heavily for most of the night and the only light is from the beams of a few torches. The team, accompanied by the Guardian, has to dodge felled branches, taking care not to fall into holes that have been dug in the earth. Cigarette packets, empty bottles of alcohol and the odd shoe are strewn across the forest floor.
A couple of rangers start uncovering a pit that has been sealed with pieces of wood overlaid with material and sand. They throw a rock into the hole and it takes about three seconds to hit the bottom. “It’s deep, probably about 25 metres,” says Landry. “That would have taken about two to three weeks to dig.”
Landry is chief of the Service de Contrôle Forestier, an elite unit of 10 men whose mission is to defend Ivory Coast’s 234 classified forests from illegal goldminers, loggers and cocoa farmers, and to safeguard reforestation efforts.
Ivory Coast has lost about 80% of its forests in 60 years. Between 2001 and 2021, the country lost 3.46m hectares (8.5m acres), equivalent to a 23% decrease, due largely to intensive cultivation of cocoa and goldmining. A 2019 Global Forest Watch report found that Ivory Coast had the second-highest percentage increase in deforestation in the world between 2017 and 2018. About 70% of tree felling was in protected areas.
Faced with this dramatic loss, Ivory Coast took action. In 2019, it adopted a code to preserve, rehabilitate and extend the country’s forests. Anyone caught illegally mining in protected areas can now be fined or sent to prison for up to five years.
“Goldmining in protected forests has been a problem for a long time, but recently it’s been getting worse,” says Landry, whose unit was formed after the political crisis in 2010-11, when the forests were being heavily exploited.
The past 10 years have been “a real fight, but I can say that we have secured 75-80% of our classified forests”, he says. “We have many forests without any infiltrations and many where they are at a minimum. With regards to where we are now compared with [before], I’m satisfied with the situation.”
The prospect of striking gold lures diggers from neighbouring Mali, Burkina Faso and Guinea. They come to escape conflict in their home countries and seek their fortunes in dozens of small unlicensed mines. Some illegal miners will hire traditional hunters, the feared Dozos, to protect their mines. Many people in Ivory Coast view them as possessing special power, wisdom and strength.
after newsletter promotion
Landry explains that two grams of gold can fetch up to 25,000 CFA francs (£33). “Imagine what you can get from a kilo. It’s a much quicker way of making money than agriculture.”
In an operation in Téné forest last year, 21 gold diggers were arrested and their materials confiscated. Landry’s unit is conducting an investigation into gold-smuggling networks.
The impact on the environment is deleterious. Digging up ore displaces huge piles of earth and rock, and trees are cut down in the process. Mercury and cyanide used to extract gold pollute water and land, endangering the health of people and ecosystems. The river running through Téné forest is a vital source of water for the country’s largest nursery, where millions of trees are grown for reforestation efforts.
What’s more, as Pierre d’Herbès, an independent defence and security expert focusing on west Africa, explains, the search for gold exacerbates social problems. ““There’s the question of the degradation of the earth … but also competition around who controls the mines and the land which is found to be suitable for exploitation. It often leads to inter-community conflict,” he says.
Child labour and slavery are found in clandestine goldmining operations, as are prostitution, drugs, alcohol and guns. In some cases, miners have links with jihadists, especially in Mali and Burkina Faso, earning money for their terror campaigns back home, says d’Herbès.
As clandestine goldmining operations become more sophisticated and organised, Landry’s team has had to adapt. They use networks of informers who supply them with information, and drones to scope out illegal activity before planning an operation. They carry guns, but only for self-defence, he says. Travelling silently on foot in the middle of the night and carrying little so they can move fast, the strategy is to take people by surprise, ambushing diggers early in the morning after they have been working all night, so that resistance is minimal.
At the goldmine in Téné, Landry and his team discuss next steps. There have been no arrests tonight; the heavy rain kept the diggers away. They talk about setting up a surveillance operation to keep track of what is going on, and plan to fill in the mines, which will impede the gold diggers’ progress.
As they walk back to where they left the vehicles, three miles away at the entry to the forest, there is the sound of crushers in the distance. They are almost certainly breaking the rocks containing gold collected earlier from Téné. “They’re located outside the boundary of the forest,” says Landry. “There’s nothing we can do.”
The government of Ivory Coast paid for the Guardian’s accommodation.