Modern gold mining has developed a Midas touch, turning low-grade deposits into vast wealth but with devastating consequences: over 900 farmers poisoned by a mercury spill in the mountains of Peru; Akyim indigenous people from Ghana forced from their forest homeland; an Indonesian bay and fishing community contaminated by arsenic and mercury; the Western Shoshone nation in Nevada deprived of their treaty rights and ancestral land.
These are just some of the accusations levelled at one of the new kings of the global gold empire, the Newmont Mining Corporation.
