00:00Dozens of artisanal miners swam this hillside in Nundu, a village in Chiwamba, just outside Malabi's capital, Lilongwe.
00:09None of them has a legal mining license, but the digging doesn't stop.
00:14For them, this is the only livelihood they've ever known.
00:30A village in Chiwamba is a part of the building for the kongyan region.
00:35There are many people who've loved us and had to look at it.
00:38When the village is over, I've been there for many years.
00:43I've been there for years and years and years and decades.
00:49I've been there for years and years in this past.
00:59Across Malawi, unregulated small-scale gold mining has exploded over the past decade,
01:06creeping into forests, riverbanks, and farmland.
01:10The fallout is everywhere.
01:12Polluted water, unstable soil, and fast-spreading land degradation.
01:18Experts warn the country is itching toward an environmental tipping point.
01:23It's a time bomb. We really need to make sure that the situation is arrested
01:30by making sure that we formalize these illegal miners so that they can access the right technology through financing
01:39and the right sustainable way of exploiting these small mineral occurrences.
01:47Informal groups say the crisis can still be contained, but only if authorities act fast and bring the public along.
01:57So it's the duty of all these institutions to ensure that the necessary procedures are actually taken
02:10to address the issues related to illegal gold mining,
02:16but also more importantly to inform the public about the implications
02:22in the event that there are chemicals that are actually being used
02:25and at the end of the day the order that is actually being left out after the panning has been
02:31done.
02:32Regulators admit the problem is growing faster than their capacity,
02:37but say new efforts are underway to push back.
02:40So we are tackling these issues together with other stakeholders,
02:46the district councils, the ministry of energy and mining.
02:52So there are plans that have been put in place to engage other stakeholders,
02:57like the district councils, they can recruit their own mining officers
03:04to help us with the monitoring of their mining activities.
03:07As Malawi races to reign in illegal mining,
03:12the question remains,
03:14can the country protect its environment without cutting off the livelihoods so many depend on?
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