3 - Territories of Gold Mining: International Investment and Artisanal Extraction in Sudan

Summary

With South Sudan’s secession in mid-2011, Sudan was plunged into an economic crisis by the loss of most of its oil resources to the new state. Land and the ability to contract usage rights for land surface and subterranean resources have turned into an important source of revenue for the Government of Sudan. In this chapter, we complement the contributions on disrupting territories which deal with land surface by peering into negotiations over the exploitation of subterranean resources – namely gold.

In recent years the government allocated land parcels of various sizes for gold mining, whereby the largest areas were allotted to foreign private enterprises. We assert that the new wave of investments in mining and agriculture is part of the historical conversion of collective land rights into private property, a process that accelerated again with the spread of neoliberal governance and the internationalization of business ventures. In their spatial consequences, the mining concessions are similar to recent agro-investments: the contracts between the Government of Sudan and foreign investors have alienated rural populations from what they view as their land. Yet, concomitantly artisanal gold mining has turned into a new source of income for thousands of small-scale actors. Based on a case study from north-eastern Sudan, we show that there are various tensions between the legal framework set up by the government which favours industrial mining, the official procedures and practices in the mining sector, and local artisanal mining arrangements. Instead of defusing such tensions, the government is merely pursuing a politics of extracting ‘admission fees’ to natural resources: On the one hand, legislation clearly supports large-scale investors and the industrial mining sector, which also fills Khartoum’s coffers. But on the other hand, the government seldom intervenes to regulate and prohibit artisanal mining being carried out within concession areas and in direct competition with industrial private enterprises. In conclusion, we suggest that the effective control and administration of a territory are secondary aspects in the government’s ability to work as a passage point that can allow foreign capital into Sudan (see Callon 1986). Its primary interest is in extracting money for legal rights to territorialized natural resources.