Anna Berghäll, translated by Linus Atarah
Our mobile lifestyle fuels conflicts and poverty in the Democratic Republic of Congo
“Congolese no longer have the words with which to express the horrors which take place in the mines. All we have left is the curse of resources”, says Prince Kumwamba.
Congolese Kumwamba is director of ACIDH, an NGO, and project partner of FinnWatch. Towards the end of last year FinnWatch and Swedish SwedWatch produced two important research reports for a European Union-sponsored project MakeITfair about the materials required by the electronic industry.
As a Congolese human rights lawyer and one who has seen everything Kumwamba is perhaps already speechless but one can get an understanding of the mining working conditions from the FinnWatch report, “Connecting components, diving communities”
According to cautious estimates, at least 2 million people directly depend on this extremely troublesome, dangerous and precarious means of livelihood. If every mine worker supports five other people, it can be assumed that every fifth Congolese procures his or her living from extraction by hand.
In spite of the abundance of minerals in many of the mines and the productivity most of them live in poverty. Most of Congolese miners earn 1-3 dollars (0.60-1.9 Euros) a day irrespective of whether they are mining diamonds, gold, copper, coltane, cobalt or tin.
According to UN estimates, 75 per cent of the miners are unable to fulfill their families’ basic needs from their earnings. Many are forced to remain in the mines against their will because they are indebted or because they have abandoned their homes and farms far away from the mines.
Cobalt also comes to Finland
It is usual in the Congolese mines to build 200 metres long shafts without any support structures in contravention of the law. Workers generally have no protective gear or equipment for instance in case of working in a mine with radioactive minerals.
Most of the workers are paid daily and have no trade union rights.
”If there is a trade union in the mines it is formed by the company and their only purpose is to take workers’ views elsewhere than improving their own conditions”, says Kumwamba.
In addition to miners hired by firms tens of thousands of individuals have been driven by poverty and desperation and end up at the mines in search of riches. 40 per cent are estimated to be children”.
The Democratic Republic of Congo has ratified International Labour Organisation (ILO) convention 182 which forbids the worst forms of child labour such as working in mines. Generally children mine, transport the minerals on their backs for long distances, wash, bag and sell their finds to intermediaries. The intermediaries who buy the minerals, according to Kumwamba, are in the full know of the involvement of children in the mines.
In the Eastern Katanga province Finnish-American money has also entered into the fray. A United States’ chemical company OM Group has the world’s biggest cobalt factory in Kokkola, OMG Kokkola, which buys cobalt from Lubumbashi.
Heikki Pihlaja, the man in charge of OMG Kokkola’s projects says in a SwedWatch interview that it is in the interests of both the company and its clients that no child labour and hand-dug minerals be involved in its production chain.
”We are certain it is case and that ILO principles are adhered to in our cobalt procurement chain. We are however actively tightening our control on these issues”, says Pihlaja.
In addition to human beings the environment is also suffering from artisan mining activities. Estelle Levin, a British mineral consultant, points out the destruction of forests, disturbance of water ecosystems, pollution, erosion and the nature’s many forms of diversities suffer damages.
Tin and cobalt for the needs of IT industries
Behind Congo’s mining boom is the information technology industry. The demand for raw materials grew strongly at the end of the 1990s, the time when the war in Congo was at its worst. In addition to the intervention of foreign warring factions, Congolese factions also began to fight over the control of the mines.
In the year of 2000, international community’s taking notice of the so-called war minerals, an increasing knowledge of the suspicions linking them to the information technology’s brand, as well as the bursting of the IT bubble brought down prices considerably.
According to FinnChurch Aid executive director Antti Pentikäinen, this directly contributed to the signing of a peace agreement in 2003. Finnchurch Aid is the only Finnish organization operating at this moment in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
”I wish minerals also had similar system which brought the Sierra Leone’s war diamonds to a halt. Customers, and through that retailers began to put pressure on producers, and now undesignated war diamonds no longer has a market”.
There are also diamonds in the Congo but the constantly needed material for the IT industry is tin. Two to three per cent of the entire world’s tin comes from Eastern Congo. The popularity of tin has grown after the European Union among others disallowed the use of coltane and that brought down its price dramatically. A metal named tantalite is extracted from coltane and it is used among other things in making mobile phone capacitors. Tin is used to produce fine solder in bread boards.
“The biggest tin mine in Congo is situated in Bisie in the North Kivu province. The mine is controlled by armed factions which leaves behind about one-hundredth of the mine’s wealth to each of the inhabitants. To the controlling armed groups and corrupt local officials the mine produces 300 000 US dollars a month” says Päivi Pöyhönen of FinnWatch
About a quarter of Congo’s cobalt goes into the manufacture of lithium batteries.
Is silence golden?
Last year MakeITFair project sent out a questionnaire to 22 electronic firms about the origins of the metals they use. Among them were all the known names such as Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, Sony, Ericsson, Philips and Microsoft. Twelve firms responded to the questionnaire. Only Nintendo nearly gave all the names of the entire chain of the component procurement, Hewlett Packard provided the names of suppliers of batteries.
Nokia failed to respond to the questionnaire but member companies of EICC or GeSI, the organ dealing with ethical issues in the electronic industry gave a collective response. Nokia is a member of the Global e-Sustainable Initiative GeSI). However, the companies did not provide the names of procurers of their components.
The companies felt that the mining of metals is far beyond the reach of their circle of influence. Typically in the electronics companies only the next stage in the production chain was known, at most from two phases onwards. The companies also responded that they were marginal users of the metals because a small amount of metals is needed in one electronic component.
The journey of the metals from the mines to factories is a complicated one but for example, not so difficult to trace than”components” used in the textile industry, the reports says.
For instance, tin ingots typically end up in the city Goma from where it proceeds to Ruanda, Uganda, or to Tanzania’s biggest city Dar es Salaam.
At this stage the tin has already changed to new ownership. The new owner is European, the greatest probability being a Belgian firm which sells the tin to the biggest tin producers: China, Indonesia, Thailand or Malaysia. The tin producers sell the final product to the big manufacturers of electronic goods.
One can hardly speak of the marginal importance of metals to the electronic industry in the light of the following figures: In 2006 over one billion mobile phones were manufactured. One quarter of the weight of a mobile phone without the battery is made of metal. About 18 million web cameras alone were sold in 2004. According to forecasts by Gartner, a firm researching the sector, the sale of personal computers increased by 12 per cent last year.
In spite of all the problems those who know the conditions surrounding the initial production of Congo minerals do not recommend a boycott of the firms using them. Raw materials have brought a lot of hardship to Congo but they could also bring good development, Kumwamba emphasizes.
”If an individual consumer wants in some way to make an influence, there are several forms. First of all it is worth considering whether one needs a new mobile phone each year because it is precisely because of the endless needs of consumers that’s fuels “robber mining”. Recycle, take contacts, support campaigns, seek clarifications”, Estelle Levin encourages.
The FinnWatch report, Connecting Components, dividing Communities can be obtained from www.finnwatch.org. SwedWatch report, Powering the Mobile World, www.swedwatch.org.
MakeITfair
MakeITfair is a European-wide project which informs young consumers about development problems, human rights and environmental problems arising from the electronic industry’s procurement chain. The project is co-ordinated by the Netherlands research centre SOMO.
Organisations in the project are: IRENE Holland, SwedWatch, Swedish Fair Trade Centre, Swedish Church Aid, FinnWatch, Finnish Nature Conservation Federation, German Watch, Verbraucher Iniative, Eastern Europe KARAT Coalition, Congo’s Action Centre L’Impunite´pour Les Droits Humains (ACIDH), India’s CIVIDEP and China’s Labour Action China
