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Ivory Coast Farmers Ditching Cocoa For Gold Mining

Ivory Coast Farmers Ditching Cocoa For Gold Mining

For many years Ivory Coast as been known for its cocoa production, but an unexpected gold rush in the West African nation is quickly turning farmers into artisanal miners as they seek better earnings.

According to a special report by the Economist, farmers in one of the fastest growing economies on the continent have been frustrated by meager earnings in the cocoa fields and are quickly turning to gold mining for better fortunes.

“You can work for years in cocoa and not get anything. You won’t even have food,” Joseph Bado, a former cocoa farmer who shifted to gold mining, told the Economist.

Ivory Coast is the world biggest cocoa producer, but this could change if more small scale farmers abandon the crop for better earnings in the gold business.

A slump in the cocoa prices on the international market and a jump in those of minerals has prompted a boom in artisanal mining in the country.

The government estimates that some half a million people are dealing in small-scale mining. There were none only a decade ago.

Extracting the precious metal has become so lucrative that small boom towns are emerging with near 24-hour micro-economies as miners work around the clock to eke out enough gold to feed their families.