Another huge social cost of gold price suppression can be seen in an illustrated essay posted this week by the internet magazine Sapiens about the environmental damage done by wildcat gold mining in the Amazon River rainforest.
That is, environmental remediation is always a big cost of responsible gold mining. But when the gold price is pushed below the point where environmentally responsible mining can be done profitably, controlled by governments and major corporations, which can be held to account, wildcat miners take over and mine without remediation, extracting the natural wealth while failing to repair the damage they do.
Governments that are usually pretty weak to begin with may be able to hold corporations to account but are not able to police thousands of wildcatters, who can vanish quickly.
The illustrated essay is headlined "Gold Glimmers in the Amazon" and it's posted at Sapiens here:
http://www.sapiens.org/culture/amazon-gold-mining/
