Reporting
Fight Against Conflict Minerals Treads Shaky Path
SOURCE:
An 11-year-old child miner in Eastern Congo.
Consumerism is a dangerous game to play. But perhaps more dangerous is the prevalence of ‘conflict minerals’ in our cell phones, laptops and video games, which is likely enabling one of the bloodiest, most protracted wars since World War II – the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Conflict minerals are those mined in conflict areas and used to finance armed groups. The DRC has been a particularly notorious example – though the second war in Congo ended in 2003 when the country was taken over by a transitional government, fighting has persisted and both government and rebel troops have continued to profit from the sale of such minerals to electronic companies.
Dozens of electronics companies source tin ore, tantalum and tungsten, which makes your cell phone vibrate, from the DRC. The business of companies like Nintendo, Canon, Toshiba, IBM and Apple has made the DRC the world’s fifth largest supplier of tin ore, and 10 percent of the tungsten imported to the U.S. comes from the DRC’s mines.
On the legislative side of the issue is the Dodd-Frank Act, which President Obama signed in 2010 and requires American companies to disclose whether their mineral-based products were mined in the DRC or a nearby country.
Initiatives like the Enough Project, a project of the Center for American Progress, have used policy analysis and on-the-ground activism to push for the Securities and Exchange Commission to follow up their legislation with regulations that aren’t constrained by a phase-in period and for the development of a credible international certification system.
Enough also pushes for American universities to sign onto a nation-wide campaign to leverage the buying power of one of the biggest consumer groups of electronics–students–to pressure companies to more ethically source their minerals.
And these policies and efforts have made a noticeable impact on the ground in Congo – in April, , sales of tin ore in one of the DRC’s mining provinces fell more than 90 percent, according to Bloomberg.
But the complexity of economic realities in the DRC may mean that moving business away from the mines is not enough to solve the deep-seated problems fueling the conflict.
Dr. Frida Mitifu, the DRC ambassador to the United States, told the Atlantic recently that one of the results of these policies has been more poverty. “The private sector has been obliged to lay off people because they are not allowed to export,” Mitifu said. “We really need to find a quick solution otherwise this God-given potential that God put in the DRC might truly turn into some kind of curse."
And Laura Seay, a professor of political science at Morehouse College, argued this month in the Christian Science Monitor that campaigns focusing on only a small part of the issue are to blame.
“Because it is almost impossible to verify whether minerals sourced from the DRC or its neighbors are truly conflict-free, electronics companies now have a strong incentive to source minerals elsewhere, leaving Congolese miners unemployed,” Seay wrote. “While the advocates behind this provision claim to have never intended to create a boycott on Congolese minerals, their poor understanding of the near-impossibility of creating a reliable tracing scheme in a place where almost every public official can be bribed (not to mention that they don't understand the real drivers of conflict) means that there is now in place a de facto boycott on minerals from the conflict zones.”
“As money from the mines becomes increasingly scarce, Congo's warlords have moved on to targeting the banana trade,” Seay continues. “Perhaps conflict-free bananas will be the next object of activist enthusiasm.”
Sasha Lezhnev, a program consultant with the Enough Project, told Campus Progress the answer to these concerns is a well-rounded approach to pressuring governments and industry.
“We absolutely don’t need to ignore the concerns of Congolese miners” to end the adverse effects of conflict minerals, Lezhnev argues. Instead, “aid agencies and companies must partner together in a livelihood initiative to make sure that in this temporary period … helping the development of Eastern Congo is something we won’t shy away from.”
Yana Kunichoff is a staff writer for Campus Progress.
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