Wages cannot keep up with how fast the US federal government has been devaluing the dollar, and perhaps the only way to protect against this is to own gold.
In a three-year partnership, supported by a R6-million Gold Fields grant in 2017, a range of research projects are underway at both post-graduate and under-graduate level in the Wits School of Mining Engineering.
Workers will go to extreme lengths to break into mine sites in Africa, sometimes tunneling underneath walls or living underground to extract ore with a pick-axe.
Native communities from the Peruvian Amazon and the Andes have filed at least eight lawsuits against the government since passage of the so-called "prior consultation" law in 2011.