Mercury still runs through Uganda's gold pits

As a party to the Minamata Convention, Uganda is committed to reducing and where feasible eliminating mercury use in artisanal and small-scale gold mining, including through national action planning and support for alternative processing.

National action plans of this kind typically commit signatories to formalising the sector, reducing mercury trade and use, and reducing exposure, particularly among women and children who are disproportionately involved in amalgam processing at household level. The gap between commitment and implementation is well documented across signatory states, and Uganda's experience so far is broadly consistent with that pattern rather than an outlier.

Amalgamation requires no plant, no electricity and no working capital, and it delivers a saleable product the same day. Gravity concentration plus shared cyanidation delivers better recovery but requires a fixed facility, trained operators and a payment model that survives a bad month.

Programmes that supplied equipment without a maintenance budget and an offtake channel have generally failed within two seasons. That is a design failure rather than a behavioural one.

The health case for phasing down mercury is not in serious dispute, exposure is linked to severe neurological harm and disproportionately affects processors working directly with amalgam at household level, often including children. The persistent gap between that clear health rationale and actual behaviour change on the ground is a useful illustration of how weakly moral argument alone shifts practice when the economic alternative is not genuinely competitive.

Centralised processing hubs serving multiple licensed cooperatives, with tailings retained and reprocessed rather than discarded, have reduced mercury demand where they were paired with a guaranteed buyer. Licensed medium-scale operators adjacent to artisanal workings are the most plausible hosts for that infrastructure.

Some practitioners in the field argue that international mercury phase-down programmes underweight how rational amalgamation actually is for a household operating with no access to capital markets, and that outside advocates pushing rapid elimination without first solving the financing and offtake problem are, in effect, asking the poorest participants in the chain to absorb a cost that wealthier actors further up the supply chain are unwilling to fund.

We think that critique is largely correct as a description of why past phase-down efforts have underperformed, and it strengthens rather than weakens the case made above: mercury use is an economic response to a financing gap, not a preference that moral appeals or blanket bans can be expected to overcome on their own. Programme design that ignores this will keep producing the same two-season failure pattern regardless of how much political commitment accompanies it.