Resourcing Tomorrow on artisanal formalisation: collaboration lessons for mine teams
Reviewed by Tom Sullivan
First reported on Mining Technology – News
30 Second Briefing
Artisanal and small-scale mining now involves an estimated 315 million people worldwide and supplies about 20% of global gold plus roughly 25% of both tantalum and tin, yet remains largely informal with significant social and environmental risks. Pan American Silver’s Brent Bergeron told the Resourcing Tomorrow 2025 audience that around half of the company’s sites now face artisanal activity, citing Peru where an estimated $8bn of gold leaves the country annually through opaque channels. Pan American is piloting on‑concession cooperatives, including a 98‑member group in Peru, and backs World Gold Council schemes where central banks buy artisanal gold in local currency to formalise supply chains.
Technical Brief
- Formalisation within concessions is being used to improve artisanal mining methods, metallurgical recoveries and processing controls.
- Internal workforce pressure is driving Pan American to trace supply chains to avoid “contaminated” artisanal gold inputs.
- Bergeron links unregulated artisanal flows in Peru to unknown groups, raising due‑diligence and security‑of‑supply concerns.
- For large operators, co‑existence with ASM on concessions is shifting safety management from exclusion to controlled, supervised integration.
Our Take
With artisanal and small-scale mining now accounting for around 20% of global gold output and a quarter of tantalum and tin, formalisation in Peru, Ecuador and Colombia directly affects supply security for ‘critical minerals’ stories that feature heavily across our recent Mining coverage.
The cited US$8 billion of artisanal gold leaving Peru annually signals that, for companies like Pan American Silver, structured engagement with ASM can be as material to licence-to-operate and national revenue debates as conventional tax and royalty regimes in other Sustainability-tagged pieces.
The shift from informal miners encroaching on concessions to a 98‑member cooperative on a Pan American Silver site in Peru illustrates a practical template that other operators in ASM-heavy jurisdictions in our database are likely to study, especially where over half of a company’s assets face similar pressures.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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