LONDON, 17 Oct. - (ANA) - This case study traces Myanmar’s gold supply chain from mine to market, and reveals how the precious metal empowers armed actors, poisons the environment and divides communities whose livelihood options are shrinking.

 

‘Spoil of War: How Conflict Shapes Myanmar’s Gold Supply Chain’, produced by The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), explains the outsized role gold plays in Myanmar’s society, as well as in its internal conflict. Gold provides a livelihood to hundreds of thousands of subsistence miners, a source of revenue for business elites and armed groups, and a safe store of value for ordinary citizens at times of financial turmoil.

 

These functions have grown since the military seized power in 2021, igniting a conflict that has killed over 100,000 people. The country’s diverse opposition groups help to fund their struggle through gold mining, while the Myanmar military has also inserted itself into the metal’s value chain. Its members informally tax the inputs and output of the mines as they travel between opposition-held areas and regime-controlled cities, while also collecting payments from informal mines in regime territory.

 

The cities host the country’s major refineries and serve a large domestic market. Sales of bullion to ordinary investors have grown since the coup, due to the devaluation of the national currency, the kyat, and the regime’s rationing of foreign currency. The regime has tried to tame this market with price controls, resulting in increased smuggling to neighbouring countries such as India, where gold fetches a higher price.

 

This demand, combined with the financial pressures of war and the collapse of traditional livelihoods, has led to an explosion of mostly small-scale mining, conducted with few if any environmental or workplace standards. Toxic mercury used in processing enters the air and communal water sources, while rivers silt up from excessive dredging and productive farmland is carved into abandoned mining sites.

 

This rampant exploitation divides communities and entrenches corruption. It also strengthens armed actors and leaves ordinary civilians with little say over how their resources and local economies are governed. This phenomenon extends across the lines of the conflict and can endure under ceasefires if the root causes of fighting are not addressed.

 

After describing each stage of the supply chain, and examining who benefits, this case study looks at how Myanmar gold is illicitly flowing across South and Southeast Asia and possibly entering global markets. It also considers how outside actors can feasibly respond to the harms of an industry that is so deeply entangled in Myanmar’s conflict and political crisis. -(ANA) -

 

AB/ANA/17 October 2026 - - -