There are two elements to the dark side of gold: labour and environment.

The Peruvian photojournalist Marco Garro, 42, has powerful first-hand testimony on the former. It all began for him with an assignment for the newspaper Peru 21, in 2006. Travel to the mining towns in the Andes and report on the lives of their residents, he was told.

Initial research indicated that residue from mines was being mismanaged, causing symptoms of lead poisoning.

When he arrived in the mining town of Cerro de Pasco, 14,000 ft above sea level, he saw stunted, severely anaemic children with frequent nosebleeds. In some mines, lead was also being mined. The residue was being dumped around population centres. Contaminants were leaching into groundwater, particularly in the monsoon, and in summer, wind carried the contaminated dust into homes.

Exploitation took wild forms too. In one practice common in informal, artisanal mines, miners worked without remuneration for a period and were then given three to five days to recover their pay from the mine, in the form of as much gold as they could find. “It’s a kind of modern slavery,” Garro says, adding, “I was surprised to discover the extent of how these territories, which sustain the country’s economy, bear the brunt of it all.”

Peru, the world’s eighth-largest producer, produced 128.8 tonnes of gold in 2023. India’s imports from this country in the first half of 2024 alone rose 81% year-on-year, to $1.47 billion.

Garro says he looked for signs that any of this wealth was ending up in the communities that made the mining possible and found few signs that they benefited. Instead, it was eroding ecosystems. Many of the gold mines in the Andes are polluting the nearby lakes that local communities depend on.

Even considering how dependent the Peruvian economy is on mining in general, and gold in particular, what he saw made him wonder, he says, “Was it more important to extract gold and destroy these unique environments?”

In 2018, Garro turned some of what he saw into a photo project titled The Gold We Inherited, the Gold of Our Dreams. It traced Peru’s rich, devotional history with gold, and its evolution into today’s hypercapitalist levels of trade and export.

“Although it has remained one of the most coveted objects of civilisation throughout time, its meaning has changed for the societies that have used it,” he says. “It has lost its mystical connotation and become a medium of exchange, money and power.”

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In India, Mridula Ramesh, founder of the Sundaram Climate Institute and author of The Climate Solution, says she heard a shocking story from her mother, who grew up near the Kolar Gold Fields in the early 1940s.

As children, she told Ramesh, she and her siblings played near open cyanide pits.

About 100 km from Bengaluru, the town of Kolar was once home to the world’s second-deepest gold mine. When it shut in 2001, amid shrinking profit margins, it had been active for 121 years.

In a process called cyanide leaching, metal cyanide was used here, to separate gold from its ore. The resulting effluents were dumped in heaps, locally called cyanide mounds, potentially contaminating groundwater.

“What worries me today is that, as artisanal mining (informal, small scale operations that use minimal machinery) picks up, those who work at such mines and live around them may not get any substantive protections and will thus suffer the consequences that such miners face globally,” Ramesh says.

Meanwhile, gold remains an integral part of dowry, and this can have fatal implications.

In her book The Climate Solution, for instance, Ramesh writes of a 2014 study in which economists from University of Virginia and Tufts University, US, examined data from more than 500 districts in India over a decade to find that whenever rains fell by a standard deviation in a district, dowry deaths rose by 8% on average in that district.

Farm losses translated directly into demands for more dowry and the eventual killing of brides so that men could remarry and bring more gold home. The groom’s family saw this as a form of income smoothening, the researchers found. “This is a horrifying yet important way to understand how the rising price of gold, coupled with a changing environment, can link with personal disaster,” Ramesh says.

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