A Call to the Ghana Medical Association
The warning has moved from our rivers into our hotels.
The Ghana Hotels Association reports that some guests are refusing locally sourced fish because they fear contamination from galamsey-polluted waters. Hotels are consequently being forced to import fish and other produce. This is not merely a problem for fishermen or hotel owners. It is an early symptom of a much larger national economic and public-health collapse.
Today, it is local fish that consumers distrust. Tomorrow, it may be vegetables, fruits, cocoa, meat, drinking water and every product grown, processed or prepared with water from Ghana.
Once a nation loses confidence in its food and water, it loses far more than markets. It loses food security, jobs, foreign exchange, public health and eventually the ability to function as a viable society.
Galamsey is not destroying one industry. It is poisoning the foundation upon which virtually every industry depends: clean water, fertile soil, healthy ecosystems and healthy human beings.
1. Fish and the Fisheries Industry
Fish is already becoming the first visible commercial casualty.
Galamsey discharges enormous quantities of sediment and may introduce mercury and other toxic substances into rivers and surrounding ecosystems. Mercury released into the environment can be converted into methylmercury, enter the aquatic food chain and accumulate in fish. The World Health Organization identifies the nervous system and kidneys among the organs vulnerable to mercury toxicity, with unborn children and young children facing particular risks. (WHO)
The industries affected include:
- Inland fishing
- Aquaculture
- Fish processing and smoking
- Cold storage and distribution
- Restaurants, chop bars and hotels
- Supermarkets and food retailers
- Tourism and hospitality
- Fish-feed production
When consumers no longer trust Ghanaian fish, fishermen lose their livelihoods, hotels import substitutes, demand for foreign currency rises and the country exports jobs while importing food.
The fish may be the first product rejected. It will not be the last.
2. Drinking Water and the Entire Water Economy
The next great crisis will be water.
Galamsey increases the turbidity of rivers and makes water treatment more difficult, expensive and sometimes technically impossible. Ghana Water has previously reported substantial losses of raw water during treatment in heavily polluted mining areas. Treatment plants serving contaminated rivers have also had to suspend or reduce operations. (Graphic Online, GBC Ghana)
The affected products and industries will include:
- Pipe-borne water
- Sachet water
- Bottled water
- Ice production
- Soft drinks and fruit beverages
- Breweries and distilleries
- Food-processing companies
- Restaurants and hotels
- Commercial laundries
- Car-washing businesses
- Construction and concrete production
- Pharmaceutical manufacturing
- Cosmetics and personal-care products
If local water sources become untreatable, Ghana will face chronic rationing, dependence on expensive groundwater, desalination or, in the worst case, water importation.
Imagine a country exporting gold extracted by a few people while spending its scarce foreign exchange to import the water required to keep 35 million people alive. That would not be development. It would be organised national stupidity.
3. Food Crops and the Agricultural Sector
Polluted rivers do not remain inside their banks. Their water is used for irrigation, enters floodplains and interacts with agricultural soils.
Galamsey also physically destroys farmland, removes fertile topsoil and leaves behind pits, sand, gravel and unstable land. The World Bank has noted that the destruction of farmland in galamsey areas threatens food security and contributes to rising prices of staple crops. (World Bank)
Products at risk include:
- Cassava
- Plantain
- Yam
- Cocoyam
- Maize
- Rice
- Tomatoes
- Pepper
- Garden eggs
- Okra
- Leafy vegetables
- Fruits
- Spices and medicinal plants
Associated industries include farming, food transportation, wholesale markets, retail markets, school feeding, restaurants, catering, food processing and agro-export.
Even produce grown outside mining pits may suffer reputational damage if buyers begin to associate entire regions of Ghana with contaminated soil and water. Markets do not always wait for courtroom levels of proof. Suspicion alone can destroy demand.
4. Cocoa and the Chocolate Industry
Galamsey competes directly with cocoa for land and labour. Cocoa farms are sold, invaded or excavated. Rivers required by cocoa-growing communities are polluted, while forest cover and soil stability are weakened.
The affected value chain includes:
- Cocoa farmers
- Licensed buying companies
- Haulage operators
- Warehousing companies
- Cocoa-processing factories
- Chocolate and confectionery manufacturers
- Exporters
- Banks financing the cocoa sector
- Government revenue and foreign-exchange earnings
We may gain a small quantity of irresponsibly mined gold today and lose cocoa farms capable of producing wealth for generations. Gold taken from the ground does not grow again. A protected cocoa farm can support families and the national economy for decades.
5. Livestock, Poultry and Dairy Products
Animals also drink water and consume crops grown with water.
When water sources and animal feed become unsafe or scarce, the consequences move into:
- Beef
- Goat and sheep meat
- Pork
- Poultry
- Eggs
- Milk
- Animal feed
- Hides and leather
The associated industries include livestock farming, poultry production, veterinary services, feed mills, abattoirs, meat processing, cold storage, supermarkets, restaurants and hotels.
Contaminated ecosystems therefore create a food-chain problem, not simply a river-colour problem.
6. Processed Foods and Beverages
Every food-processing factory requires reliable quantities of clean water. Water is used as an ingredient, for washing raw materials, cooking, cooling, cleaning equipment and maintaining hygiene.
Products that may become more expensive or difficult to produce include:
- Bread and other baked foods
- Canned foods
- Fruit juices
- Soft drinks
- Beer and spirits
- Dairy products
- Packaged meals
- Sauces and seasonings
- Processed meat and fish
- Infant foods
If factories must install increasingly sophisticated water-treatment systems or depend on imported water and raw materials, production costs will rise. Those costs will eventually be transferred to Ghanaian families.
7. The Hospitality and Tourism Industry
The hotel industry is now confronting the fish problem, but fish is only one line on a hotel’s procurement list.
Hotels need safe water and trusted food for:
- Cooking
- Drinking
- Bathing
- Laundry
- Cleaning
- Swimming pools
- Fire suppression
- Landscaping
- Air-conditioning and cooling systems
- Staff and guest sanitation
A hotel cannot operate properly without water. Neither can a restaurant, resort or conference facility.
Environmental destruction also weakens ecotourism. No tourist travels across the world to admire poisoned rivers, abandoned mining pits, devastated forests and landscapes resembling war zones.
8. The Pharmaceutical and Healthcare-Products Industry
Water is an essential raw material in the manufacture of many medicines, disinfectants, laboratory reagents and personal-care products.
Products and services affected include:
- Intravenous fluids
- Liquid medicines
- Disinfectants
- Laboratory reagents
- Dialysis fluids
- Sterile medical supplies
- Cleaning agents
- Cosmetics
- Soaps and detergents
Local pharmaceutical manufacturers facing poor or unreliable water must spend more on purification or import inputs. This increases production costs and weakens Ghana’s health security.
9. Hospitals and the National Health System
This is where the Ghana Medical Association must recognise the full scale of the threat.
Hospitals cannot function without a continuous supply of clean water. Water is required for:
- Handwashing and infection prevention
- Drinking and food preparation
- Cleaning wards, theatres and consulting rooms
- Sterilising instruments
- Surgical scrubbing
- Dialysis
- Laboratory testing
- Maternity and neonatal care
- Laundry and linen services
- Toilets and sewage disposal
- Mortuary operations
- Cooling and maintaining equipment
- Fire protection
Without water, operating theatres close. Dialysis units stop. Laboratories cannot function reliably. Maternity wards become dangerous. Toilets become disease reservoirs. Infection prevention collapses.
At the same time, galamsey may increase the number of patients requiring care through mercury and other chemical exposures, kidney injury, neurological disorders, occupational injuries, respiratory problems, waterborne disease and malaria associated with abandoned water-filled pits.
The health system will therefore be attacked from both directions: more patients will arrive at hospitals, while the hospitals themselves lose the clean water required to treat them.
That is not an environmental inconvenience. It is a national medical emergency.
10. Construction, Manufacturing and Energy
Water is also indispensable to construction and industrial production.
Affected activities include:
- Concrete and block production
- Road construction
- Mining outside the galamsey sector
- Textile manufacturing
- Paper production
- Metal processing
- Equipment cooling
- Hydroelectric generation
- Industrial cleaning
Siltation and degradation of river systems can damage reservoirs, increase maintenance requirements and threaten water-dependent energy and industrial infrastructure.
No serious manufacturing economy can be built on poisoned water, unstable land and collapsing ecosystems.
11. Banking, Insurance and Public Finance
The consequences will eventually reach sectors that appear far removed from rivers.
Banks will hold loans secured against farms and businesses whose productivity has collapsed. Insurance companies will face rising health, agricultural and commercial claims. Government will collect less tax from struggling industries while spending more on water treatment, food imports, healthcare, land reclamation and social support.
The wider consequences include:
- Loan defaults
- Business closures
- Unemployment
- Food inflation
- Higher healthcare expenditure
- Reduced export earnings
- Increased imports
- Pressure on the cedi
- Greater public debt
- Rural poverty and displacement
Galamsey wealth is concentrated in a few hands. Its costs are transferred to the entire population and to generations not yet born.
The Ghana Medical Association Cannot Remain a Spectator
The Ghana Medical Association must not treat galamsey as an issue belonging only to environmentalists, chiefs, politicians or water engineers.
This is a health emergency developing in slow motion.
Doctors will eventually be asked to manage the kidney damage, neurological impairment, adverse pregnancy outcomes, childhood developmental harm, occupational injuries and infectious diseases associated with degraded environments. Yet medicine cannot prescribe its way out of poisoned rivers.
Dialysis cannot replace a national water system. A paediatrician cannot restore a child’s lost neurodevelopmental potential. A surgeon cannot operate safely in a hospital without water. A nephrologist cannot reverse the destruction of every kidney damaged by toxic exposure.
The GMA possesses scientific authority, national visibility and a professional obligation to protect life. It must therefore demand:
- The immediate cessation of mining in rivers, forest reserves and protected areas.
- Independent testing and public reporting of water, soil, fish, crops and human exposure in affected communities.
- A national health-surveillance programme focused on children, pregnant women and mining communities.
- Mandatory reclamation of destroyed land and prosecution of financiers, officials and traditional authorities who facilitate illegal mining.
- Protection of water-treatment catchments and health facilities from further ecological degradation.
- A clear national deadline for restoring affected rivers and farmlands.
- Decisive collective action if the state continues to supervise the destruction of the country’s foundations of life.
The report that hotel guests are refusing Ghanaian fish should be treated as an alarm bell.
First, we lost confidence in the rivers. Now we are losing confidence in the fish. Soon, it may be the vegetables, cocoa, meat and drinking water. Thereafter, hotels, farms, factories and hospitals will begin to fail one after another.
No economy survives the death of its ecology.
And no health system survives the poisoning of the water, food and people it was created to protect.
The GMA must speak and act now – not after the fish have disappeared, the taps have stopped flowing and our hospitals have become buildings that can no longer provide care.
Sylva Vortia | Steward of the Environment