Photographs like this one of gold-dust-covered Ugandan youth last week appeared in prestigious newspapers ranging from the Washington Post, in the US, and the Sydney Morning Herald, in Australia. The young artisanal diggers were depicted in the photo shoot extracting gold from shallow openpits in Lukingi village, Mubende, 150 km south-west of Kampala, Uganda’s capital. Their digging coincided with investment banker Goldman Sachs not ruling out the possibility of gold falling below $1 000/oz in 2014, in the absence of clarity on the rate at which the US Federal Reserve may taper, the buzzword for the bank’s reduction in the pace of bond buying – more popularly known as quantitative easing.