Ghana’s government has struggled to balance the economic boon of small-scale mining with environmental and safety protections. Today, the mine is no longer producing gold and galamsey miners have quickly filled the void, wiping away cocoa farms in their path. For decades, miners toiled underground in the sprawling complex. Closely regulated, the big industrial operation transformed a small Ashanti village into a cosmopolitan city with tennis courts and golf clubs. Two decades after the arrival of cocoa, the legal Obuasi gold mine was founded. Cocoa was first planted in Ghana in the 1870s, and the former Gold Coast colony became the largest exporter of the chocolate-making beans for the next century, until neighboring Ivory Coast surpassed them. Gold and cocoa are both integral parts of Ghana’s economy and national identity, yet the two resources’ coexistence has contradictions. Deforestation from illegal gold mining may speed up such effects. Several other factors have been blamed for the volatile nature of the cocoa market, most notably climate change, which can usher in an extremely dry season one year and excessive rain the next. “Galamsey is the biggest threat to cocoa production,” Pomasi Ismael, the chairman of a cocoa buyers collective, told local media recently. Since then, as illegal mining steadily ramped up, cocoa production has trended downwards, with a drop to 740,000 tonnes in 2015. In 2011, Ghana produced a record-setting amount of cocoa, weighing in at over one million tonnes. Recently, the price of the bean has plummeted to historic lows on global commodity exchanges- negatively impacting the profits of West African cocoa farmers. That year, there was a cocoa surplus, attributed to a prolonged rainy season. However, cocoa production statistics have been unpredictable since then, according to the most recent data from the 2015-16 growing season. In 2014, experts predicted a global cocoa shortage by 2020. Illegal gold mining in Ghana further exacerbates a volatile cocoa market. At right, Kwame Atobrah examines a neighbor's cocoa beans. At left, farmers walk through their land that they say was destoyed by galamsey gold miners.