By Festus Poquie
On a humid morning in Godoma, a scrub of houses and corrugated roofs in Liberia’s western Gbarpolu County, children ran past a churchyard, and a woman balanced a plastic bucket on her head as she stepped down to the Godo Creek.
The creek is narrow and dark with tannin; in the dry season it dwindles to a thread. The people of Godoma drink from it, bathe in it, and wash clothes on its banks.
They have done so for generations. Nearby, beneath the forest floor, lies a different kind of river: seams of iron and veins of gold whose export, analysts say, have flowed outward for years with far less benefit to the people whose land they cross.
Liberia’s recent boom in mineral exports — led by gold and iron ore — reads like a tale of two balances. On paper the exports are large. Trade data show that in 2024 Liberia earned $1.03 billion from gold alone, making the metal the country’s largest single export.
Swiss refiners and trading houses received roughly 87 percent of that gold, according to customs records, with smaller shares routed to Lebanon and, in negligible amounts, the United States.
Iron ore shipments, too, have surged; ArcelorMittal, the global steelmaker, reported that Liberia was on track to supply 10 million tonnes in the fourth quarter of 2025, an increment the company said helped generate a year of record production and stronger-than-expected earnings.
But between the ports that loaded ships and the clinics that are supposed to stand on the other side lies a yawning accounting problem.
A U.S.-based analysis by Forest Trends — a widely cited environmental and trade research group — compared what Liberia reported exporting between 2007 and 2023 with what importing countries recorded. Liberia’s declared mining exports amounted to $5.1 billion over the period. Importing partners declared $7.8 billion. The difference — roughly $2.7 billion — is not a rounding error.
“The scale of the problem is massive,” Arthur Blundell, a co-author of the assessment, told researchers.
The study’s language is careful but blunt: persistent discrepancies consistent with misreporting, transfer pricing, or smuggling have likely cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars annually.
Those missing hundreds of millions would matter. Liberia’s public debt at the end of December stood at $2.82 billion; domestic obligations were $1.19 billion and external debt $1.62 billion, according to the Finance Ministry.
The country’s total revenue collection lingers below one billion dollars a year. In the stark arithmetic of governance, the proceeds from a single year’s gold exports could, at current rates, begin to cancel the nation’s debts or open fiscal space for schools, clinics, and roads — if only the money were counted and captured.
On the ground, the losses look less like numbers and more like empty wells and unbuilt clinics. In Godoma, the local iron-ore concession is held by a company known as BAO CHICO, which began operations in 2022. The company’s Mineral Development Agreement (MDA) includes specific obligations: safe drinking water, 24-hour medical care, community compensation.
In practice, residents say, little has been delivered beyond a single road rehabilitation listed as corporate social responsibility. “We can drink from this creek, but this water is not good,” said Musu Brawn, balancing her bucket.
“We drink and hope for better.” A community chairwoman, Mamai Dukuly, said that since she arrived in 1991 nothing had changed: Godo Creek remains their savior, and in the dry season it is perilously reduced.
Forest Trends’ assessment adds grimmer detail. Between 2007 and 2023 companies working under MDAs shared no more than $119 million with affected communities, plus about $12 million in in-kind work like road repair.
The report calculates a legal claim for community compensation at roughly $454 million if gold producers were held to the same standards as iron ore firms — a shortfall of more than $335 million on that single measure and north of $400 million in the report’s broader accounting.
Payments that do occur are often directed to county governments rather than to the people who lost land and livelihoods; audits by Liberia’s General Auditing Commission, the review notes, have repeatedly flagged gross fiscal mismanagement and insufficient oversight at the local level.
The human consequences of such governance gaps are predictable and pervasive. Forests are cleared; rivers silted; wetlands degraded. Nearly half of Liberia’s remaining forest area overlaps with active or pending mining licenses. Communities feel cheated, trapped between the expansion of export revenue and the persistence of poverty, poor services, and recurring conflict over land rights.
The study’s shorthand for the dynamic — “growth without development” — is a phrase both accurate and devastating.
At the center of the political negotiation over these resources are the MDAs themselves. Critics, and increasingly some government officials, point out that several past agreements signed by lawmakers left the state without equity stakes and relied on royalties and taxes that can be minimized through transfer pricing and misdeclaration.
In short: the contracts contained no mechanism to make Liberians co-owners of the minerals beneath their feet. Instead, they became long-term sellers of extraction rights, and — as many critics argue — the terms are skewed.
Lawmakers who approved MDAs, and the administrations under which they were negotiated, say the deals were necessary to attract capital and to overcome infrastructure constraints.
President Joseph Boakai, who in March convened a Cabinet meeting under the theme “Positioning Liberia for Mineral-Led Development and National Prosperity,” has publicly acknowledged the problem.
He called for new mining laws, a national land-use plan, strengthened customs verification, a gold refinery regulation, and incentives under an amended Whistleblower Act to combat smuggling and illicit trade.
“One of the government’s biggest challenges to protecting Liberia’s resources is limited transparency in the mining sector,” he told ministers. “We do not fully know what resources are being extracted.”
That confession, from the republic’s chief executive, signals an awareness of political risk: global mining projects require long-term stability and investor confidence, and investors expect to recoup profits.
Boakai warned his Cabinet that any reforms must respect contractual continuity even as they push for better outcomes. He urged training for Liberians in geology and resource management so the state could exercise “scrupulous monitoring” and demanded an interrogation of who really benefits from resource exploitation.
For governments in resource-rich states, such balancing acts are familiar. ArcelorMittal’s public filings read like evidence of that tension.
The company told investors that Liberia contributed materially to improved operating performance in 2025, and that the firm had generated $1.5 billion of investable cash flow in a recent 12-month period, returning $800 million to shareholders while spending $1.2 billion on strategic capital investments.
Those figures feed headlines and shareholder meetings; they do not necessarily translate into roads that stay paved, clinics that open, or water that flows.
Policy prescriptions suggested by Forest Trends and local advocates are not revolutionary: tighter monitoring of production and exports, strengthened customs verification, mandatory community equity participation, direct payment mechanisms to affected communities, and independent audits of county disbursements.
The paper also calls for enforcement of full tax and royalty compliance and a national land-use plan that carves out ecological no-go zones and protects community rights. Each step would reduce opportunities for misreporting and create clearer lines between exports and public benefit.
Yet reform here is as much political as technical. The paperwork that governs extraction is negotiated and signed by people — ministers, civil servants, and lawmakers — who are themselves situated in networks of influence.
MDAs that lack state equity are not incidental paperwork mistakes; they are outcomes of a legal and political moment in which Liberia prioritized immediacy of investment over ownership. Rewriting the rules will require political courage and, crucially, sustained pressure from civil society and the electorate.
In Godoma, such systemic debates are visible in the small gestures of everyday life: a chief’s public appeal; a woman’s plea for a hand pump; a child with a stomachache treated with bandages and hope. “It is time for change, not just promises,”
Paramount Chief Johnson Dannah said recently, addressing company managers and county legislators. The plea is both local and national. It is, in the end, an appeal that the next shipment of ore not only fatten foreign ledgers and corporate balance sheets but also pay its way into the wells and schools of Liberia.
The global market that takes Liberia’s ore and gold — from Swiss refineries to steelmakers that report quarterly gains — depends on that extractive chain staying open and politically manageable.
For Liberia, the political and moral calculus is different: can a country rich in minerals but poor in infrastructure and services map a path from export volumes to public goods? The answer may be hidden in customs ledgers, in mining auditoriums, and in the dusty decree stacks of county offices. Or it may be found, more simply, in the sound of water in a properly drilled well — a small human measurement of whether resource wealth has finally stopped flowing away.
In the tall and unfamiliar arithmetic of international trade, that brown stream is a ledger too: one where absence is counted as loss, and where a nation’s future will be decided by whether its contracts, its customs, and its conscience can be brought into line.
