Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

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Please tell the people in your country, a child of the Congo dies every day so that they can plug in their phones. That's the story in this horrifying exposé of labor practices reminiscent of the atrocities in the Congo under Leopold II. Workers, including children, mine cobalt in impoverished and often brutal conditions—risking debilitating injuries and death. Although ASM is fraught with hazardous conditions, the sector has been growing rapidly. There are roughly forty-five million people around the world directly involved in ASM, which represents an astonishing 90 percent of the world’s total mining workforce. Despite the many advancements in machinery and techniques, the formal mining industry relies heavily on the hard labor of artisanal miners to boost production at minimal expense. The contributions from ASM are substantial, including 26 percent of the global supply of tantalum, 25 percent of tin and gold, 20 percent of diamonds, 80 percent of sapphires, and up to 30 percent of cobalt.3 Throughout much of history, mining operations relied on the exploitation of slaves and poor laborers to excavate ore from dirt. The downtrodden were forced to dig in hazardous conditions with little regard to their safety and for little to no compensation. Today, these laborers are assigned the quaint term artisanal miners, and they toil in a shadowy substrate of the global mining industry called artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM). Do not be fooled by the word artisanal into thinking that ASM involves pleasant mining activities conducted by skilled artisans. Artisanal miners use rudimentary tools and work in hazardous conditions to extract dozens of minerals and precious stones in more than eighty countries across the global south. Because ASM is almost entirely informal, artisanal miners rarely have formal agreements for wages and working conditions. There are usually no avenues to seek assistance for injuries or redress for abuse. Artisanal miners are almost always paid paltry wages on a piece-rate basis and must assume all risks of injury, illness, or death.

He Needed a Big Megaphone, So He Wrote a Best Seller

Today’s tech barons will tell you a similar tale about cobalt. They will tell you that they uphold international human rights norms and that their particular supply chains are clean. They will assure you that conditions are not as bad as they seem and that they are bringing commerce, wages, education, and development to the poorest people of Africa (“saving” them). They will also assure you that they have implemented changes to remedy the problems on the ground, at least at the mines from which they say they buy cobalt. After all, who is going to go all the way to the Congo and prove otherwise, and even if they did, who would believe them? Kara investigates its Pyrrhic victory as it exploits the ignoble labor of the miners. Kara’s ability to interview those who work the mines is to his credit but it caused emotional and perhaps physical harm to those who were willing to discuss these conditions and to Kara as well. Meticulously researched and brilliantly written by Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red documents the frenzied scramble for cobalt and the exploitation of the poorest people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.”There is a vast disparity between the companies that sell products containing cobalt and the people who dig it out of the ground. I was horrified to read about the children and women who hand mine this metal for a mere dollar a day. They fear tunnel collapsing, working in radioactive water, and speaking out against their meagre wages.

Cobalt Red : Book summary and reviews of Cobalt Red by Cobalt Red : Book summary and reviews of Cobalt Red by

Such then was the main task: to convince the world that thgis Congo horror was not only and unquestionably a fact; but that it was not accidental or temporary, or capable of internal cure … To demonstrate that it was at once a survival and a revival of the slave-mind at work, of the slave-trade in being. An unflinching investigation reveals the human rights abuses behind the Congo's cobalt mining operation - and the moral implications that affect us all. Although conditions for the Congo’s cobalt miners remain exceedingly bleak, there is nevertheless cause to be hopeful. Awareness of their plight is growing and, with it, hope that their voices will no longer call out into an abyss but into the hearts of the people at the other end of the chain, who are able to see at last that the blood-caked corpse of that child lying in the dirt is one of their own. The idea that my phone has caused the death of a child in Congo is not only abhorrent, but devastating to me. Child labor is abhorrent in general, but the fact that much of the mining for cobalt is done by CHILDREN [as young as SIX YEARS OLD] and the companies that buy said cobalt have it in writing that there are no children at "THEIR" mines [because they clearly have never, ever set foot in Congo and in reality, don't want to know, as long as the money keeps coming in for them. Their lives and minds would change if they actually had to go there and SEE the littles mining this dangerous cobalt], and they don't engage in dangerous practices [again, SO not the truth]. We, as consumers of rechargeables, need to do better and hold these companies to account.Despite moments like this of Western guilt, in general Kara’s worldview seems to be that West is best. He recounts a conversation in which a Congolese researcher suggests the situation won’t improve unless companies follow minimum standards, “Just like in America.” Kara chooses to leave that comparison there rather than engage with it. Yet corporate impunity is not a Congo-specific problem. Nor is child labour, which also exists in the US. Elsewhere, Kara marvels at how different everything looks after returning from DRC, including vegetables at the grocery store and flush toilets. The dichotomy he creates through exaggerated descriptions reinforces longstanding binaries between “developed” and “underdeveloped,” and is hardly helpful in an analysis of the effects of global capitalism. Neo-colonial ethics

Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

Siddharth Kara is turning a brilliant spotlight on these inhumane practices. My hope is that people will read the truth of his many trips and interviews and feel compassion for the miners and their families, while the companies that produce the products that benefit us all turn up the heat on the way the mines are really being run, as exposed by Kara. Although the officials in the Congo believe that they need to help themselves, someone needs to start the ball rolling. Another quote spoke to me. “The mineral reserves in Congo will last another forty years, maybe fifty? During that time, the population of Congo will double. If our resources are sold to foreigners for the benefit of the political elite, instead of investing in education and development for our people, in two generations, we will have two hundred million people who are poor, uneducated, and have nothing left of value.” While Tesla’s responsible sourcing practices apply to all materials and supply chain partners, we recognize the conditions associated with select artisanal mining (ASM) of cobalt in the DRC. To assure the cobalt in Tesla’s supply chain is ethically sourced, we have implemented targeted due diligence procedures for cobalt sourcing. The severity of harm being caused by cobalt mining is sadly not a new experience for the people of the Congo. Centuries of European slave trading beginning in the early 1500s caused irreparable injury to the native population, culminating in colonization by King Leopold II, who set the table for the exploitation that continues to this day. The descriptions of Leopold’s regime remain disturbingly applicable to the modern Congo. While many in this fight are sympathetic to the suffering, Kara not only brings true expertise, he brings true empathy. Read this book to immerse yourself in both." —Jean Baderschneider, CEO, Global Fund to End Modern SlaveryEvery one of these descriptions equally conveys conditions in the cobalt mining provinces today. Spend a short time watching the filth-caked children of the Katanga region scrounge at the earth for cobalt, and you would be unable to determine whether they were working for the benefit of Leopold or a tech company. Cobalt is an essential component to every lithium-ion rechargeable battery made today, the batteries that power our smartphones, tablets, laptops, and electric vehicles. Roughly 75 percent of the world’s supply of cobalt is mined in the Congo, often by peasants and children in sub-human conditions. Billions of people in the world cannot conduct their daily lives without participating in a human rights and environmental catastrophe in the Congo. In this stark and crucial book, Kara argues that we must all care about what is happening in the Congo—because we are all implicated.” Source

Cobalt Red : How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

With extraordinary tenacity and compassion, Siddharth Kara evokes one of the most dramatic divides between wealth and poverty in the world today. His reporting on how the dangerous, ill-paid labor of Congo children provides a mineral essential to our cellphones will break your heart. I hope policy-makers on every continent will read this book.” — Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's GhostThe process of reflection that Kara describes is one that should have taken place well before setting foot in the DRC. It should have continued throughout the research, in part by consulting local organisations that work with child miners. But if his description of his own soul-searching is accurate, that did not happen. I didn’t know anything about cobalt or Democratic Republic of the Congo before I was approached by the publisher and asked to review this book. The hard truth is that the devices that I used to read about the conditions are quite likely powered by cobalt scratched from the earth by someone in slavery. From the hand of a slave to my hand. In all my time in the Congo, I never saw or heard of any activities linked to either of these coalitions, let alone anything that resembled corporate commitments to international human rights standards, third-party audits, or zero-tolerance policies on forced and child labor. On the contrary, across twenty-one years of research into slavery and child labor, I have never seen more extreme predation for profit than I witnessed at the bottom of global cobalt supply chains. The titanic companies that sell products containing Congolese cobalt are worth trillions, yet the people who dig their cobalt out of the ground eke out a base existence characterized by extreme poverty and immense suffering. They exist at the edge of human life in an environment that is treated like a toxic dumping ground by foreign mining companies. Millions of trees have been clear-cut, dozens of villages razed, rivers and air polluted, and arable land destroyed. Our daily lives are powered by a human and environmental catastrophe in the Congo. The price of lithium batteries has superseded the cost of human labor to mine cobalt. This is one of the factors that is crucial to the investigative conditions of geospatial mining that affects the chilling effects of its global distribution.