A week of severe air cargo disruptions across the Gulf has forced Ghana’s state gold exporter to draw up emergency rerouting plans, exposing a structural vulnerability that policy critics had been flagging for months: GoldBod’s dangerously narrow dependence on the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as the destination for the overwhelming majority of Ghana’s artisanal gold.
For Ghana, Africa’s biggest gold producer, Dubai normally refines around 80 percent of output from its vast artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) sector. GoldBod, the sole official buyer and exporter of Ghana’s ASM gold, has already drafted contingency routes outside the UAE, though it has yet to feel any direct impact. A senior GoldBod official said the company expected little disruption to actual trade, given longstanding interest from rival buyers. “There is always a market for gold. We have people lined up who have been knocking for years, some even ready to pay a premium,” the official said.
The disruption began on March 2 when Middle East carriers including Emirates SkyCargo, Qatar Airways Cargo and Etihad suspended flight operations following the outbreak of the US-Israeli conflict with Iran. Global air cargo capacity fell by approximately 18 percent as a result of flights being suspended or rerouted, with gold shipments among the most affected given that the metal travels by air due to its high value-to-weight ratio. With traffic at Dubai International Airport running at about 25 percent of normal levels, priority has been given to passengers and essential cargo such as pharmaceuticals, leaving gold consignments in a holding pattern.
The disruption has given concrete urgency to concerns that IMANI Africa Honorary Vice President Bright Simons had raised weeks earlier. In an analysis published before the Dubai flights were grounded, Simons warned that more than 90 percent of GoldBod’s gold exports were being sold to a small cluster of buyers in India and the UAE, with companies including Sovereign Metals in India and Pinnacle DMCC in Dubai accounting for nearly 60 percent of sales in the quarter ending September 2025. He argued that this concentration had strengthened overseas buyers’ negotiating position, enabling them to extract discounts that contributed to the trading losses of $214 million confirmed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in its fifth review of Ghana’s programme.
The IMF reaffirmed that position on January 15, 2026, with Director of Communications Julie Kozack describing the losses as quasi-fiscal in nature and recommending that they be brought onto the national fiscal balance sheet rather than left on the books of the Bank of Ghana, which she said was essential to ensuring that the central bank remained financially sound. GoldBod Chief Executive Officer Sammy Gyamfi has continued to dispute the characterisation, saying the figures represent transactional costs of an intermediary operation rather than commercial losses, and pointing to GoldBod’s own revenue surplus of more than 960 million cedis in 2025.
Potential alternative refining centres identified by gold traders and analysts include Shanghai and refining hubs in India, though both options carry higher logistics costs than the current Dubai-anchored route. South Africa’s Rand Refinery, Africa’s largest, partnered with a Ghanaian refinery in January 2026 to support GoldBod with responsible local artisanal gold refining, a move that now looks prescient given the disruption.
Ruth Crowell, Chief Executive of the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA), said the disruption creates an opportunity to reduce illicit gold flows that have long been associated with the Dubai corridor. “While the situation in the Middle East is undeniably tragic, it also creates a moment to disrupt the unwanted illicit flows that have long fuelled instability throughout Africa, particularly those driven by criminal and non-state actors,” she said.
A source at a Ghanaian ASM gold miner said a no-fly zone declaration over the Gulf would be deeply damaging. “A no-fly zone declaration would affect us big time — with no trade and no foreign exchange. The local currency may be affected with its economic consequences,” the source said.
Record-high gold prices and GoldBod’s centralisation of trade boosted Ghana’s official ASM production by 63 percent last year to 96 metric tonnes, worth approximately $15.8 billion at current prices and representing 52 percent of the country’s total gold output. How much of that value is protected going forward may depend on how quickly Ghana can diversify its refining routes away from a city now sitting at the centre of a war zone.
