$4,000 Gold Is Changing Lives Across Central Asia

As the price of gold has hovered around $4,000 an ounce in recent weeks, the men in the small-scale mines north of the village of Soykechar in Uzbekistan have watched every bounce and slide. They pull up apps on their phones that show various price points. The local TV stations announce the price. And, by word of mouth, they know the quote on the black market.“We are trying to make better lives, and we can buy good clothes for the children, better food, and we can go to private hospitals,” said Doniyor, the 34-year-old machinery manager of one of the operations.The dramatic price rise has transformed Central Asia, a corner of the world heavily dependent on gold. While the region’s governments often attribute recent rises in living standards and hot economies to their reforms, it has all been underwritten to varying degrees by rising gold prices.And the gold boom has benefited regular people – from increased government spending to the 20 percent boost in wages the miners in Soykechar say they have received in the past year. Yet, behind the soaring prices, high inflation, mounting government and personal debt, and fears of dependence on a single commodity are causes for concern.“We are back to the situation of the early ‘90s, when it was one item that carried most of the dollars. [Back then], it was cotton; and now it’s gold,” said Franco Galdini, an economist at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom who studies the Uzbek economy.But “the money they were making in the ‘90s and now is very, very different,” he added.The price of a troy ounce of gold was $2,050 on international markets at the beginning of 2024 and peaked north of $5,200 in February before falling toward $4,100 this summer. Ten years ago, the price was about $1,300.Central Asia has reaped the benefits.Uzbekistan’s overall exports hit an all-time high of $33 billion in 2025, and roughly 30 percent of it, $9.9 billion, was gold. Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan’s most valuable export is also gold, with the Kumtor mine accounting for about 10 percent of Kyrgyzstan’s GDP. Meanwhile, Kazakhstan may be the world’s largest producer of uranium, but gold is its second most valuable export after crude oil. Only Turkmenistan does not have significant gold production.The primary way that the gold price surge has helped Central Asian economies is by increasing the value of state reserves, which boosts investor confidence and makes it cheaper to borrow, Galdini said.The value of Kyrgyzstan’s reserves, about 75 percent of which are in gold, increased from $5.1 billion at the end of 2024 to $8.6 billion. Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan have all taken full advantage of cheaper credit, stacking up debt in recent years. The reserves have given regional leaders a certain confidence.“There’s not any danger to the economy. We could clear the foreign debt in one day,” Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov told a session of parliament in December.The rise in gold prices have also contributed directly to state coffers through tax revenues.The state-owned Uzbek behemoth, Navoi Mining and Metallurgical Co., which is one of the largest gold producers in the world, paid $2.64 billion in taxes last year, according to its year-end financial statements. That is nearly 12 percent of Uzbekistan’s $22.3 billion tax revenue take last year and double what the company paid in 2024.Kazakhstan’s private mining firms are cashing in on the bonanza as well.AltynGold, which operates the Sekisovskoye gold mine near Ust-Kamenogorsk, sold 29 percent more gold in the first quarter of 2026 compared to the same period last year, but its revenues were up 122 percent, the company said in a May statement. The government is hungry for a bigger cut. At the beginning of the year, Kazakhstan introduced a progressive scale for its gold extraction tax, with the biggest producers set to pay 11 percent, up from the previous flat rate of 7.5 percent.Soykechar miners in Uzbekistan are seeing benefits too, if on a much smaller scale.The men outside the village in the Navoi region say they work eight to 12 hours a day, six or seven days a week on the artisanal, open-pit mines each about an acre in size. Five operations line the road north out of Soykechar into the hills that run along the south shore of Lake Ayderkul. Exhausted plots run for another mile or two into scrubby hills. Uzbekistan legalized private, small-scale mining in 2018, and the government periodically auctions off plots. Gulum, a 48-year-old excavator driver, works in one of the plots north of Soykechar. He worked in construction in Russia from 2004 until last year. He came back to Uzbekistan to spend time with his wife and five children in a village in the neighboring Samarkand region.His monthly wages are up from $500 to $650 over the last year. That has allowed him to stay in Uzbekistan with his family, but is still not enough for the family to live comfortably, he said.The raise “gets eaten” by rising food costs, he said. “And the electricity and the gas and the water,” he adds. And then there is the loans he has taken out.Beyond inflation and debt, Central Asia’s gold rush has stoked fears of Chinese economic encroachment, a recurring theme in the region. Chinese firms already dominate gold extraction in Tajikistan, and in February 2025, companies with Chinese ownership bid up prices for 31 plots in Uzbekistan’s Navoi region before acquiring most of them, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Uzbek Service, Ozodlik, reported. The government’s Center for Subsoil Use said that the buyers were all majority-owned by Uzbek citizens.At the same time, Gulum said he has seen many more miners he believes are Chinese in the area over the past year. A white pickup truck with Chinese plates could be seen driving back and forth on the lonely road past the mines on a bright day recently.Illegal mining is another concern. Uzbek authorities busted one group of men illegally mining and processing gold north of the city of Navoi in January, and arrested four groups of illegal miners in the same area, Uzbek media reported.A shopkeeper in the hillside town of Suluk, north of Soykechar, said men in the community do illegally mine gold in the hills around the town, but a government crackdown has pushed them to do it at night and underground – literally. For the region’s governments, heavy dependence on a single commodity means that if gold prices crash, it could make a serious dent in the economies of countries like Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.That is a “big if,” said Galdini, the economist. Structural factors like the rising cost of gold extraction and central banks’ continued desire for gold are likely to keep prices elevated for the foreseeable future, he said.Even without a crash, when Kyrgyzstan’s gold exports faltered last year, total exports dropped 44 percent.Rising gold returns do not appear to have spurred widespread industrialization in the region, Galdini said. “The fundamentals are not changing,” he said.Doniyor, the equipment manager, said he bought livestock and started planning to build a new house thanks to the extra $100 he is making each month compared to when he began mining two years ago. But the gold price surge has not really changed conditions in his home village, a 15-minute walk from the mine. “The company is using the money for itself,” he said.By EurasianetMore Top Reads From Oilprice.comIndia Targets Five Small Modular Reactors by 2033U.S. Refinery Utilization Hits 96.2% as Fuel Markets Tighten WorldwideLNG Importers Seek Lower Qatar and UAE Prices as War Upends Deals