‘Here it is better not to be born’: Cobalt mining for Big Tech is driving child labor, deaths in the Congo
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Loading... - Logan Devine
- 23 Feb 2023
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Child labor, sexual assault, birth defects, abject poverty, workers buried alive: A new exposé on artisanal cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo lifts the curtain on a nightmarish world in which billions of people are unwittingly complicit. Senior climate correspondent Louise Boyle reports
During one of his many visits to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Siddharth Kara, an author and Harvard academic who has spent 20 years researching modern slavery, met a young woman sifting dirt for traces of cobalt.
Priscille told him she had suffered two miscarriages and that her husband, a fellow “artisanal” miner, died of a respiratory disease.
“I thank God for taking my babies,” she said. “Here it is better not to be born.”
It is just one of many devastating personal accounts in Cobalt Red, a detailed exposé into the hidden world of small-scale cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
The “quaint” moniker of artisanal mining, Mr Kara points out, belies a brutal industry where hundreds of thousands of men, women and children dig with bare hands and basic tools in toxic, perilous pits, eking out an existence on the bottom rung of the global supply chain.
The miners are the first step in the race for precious metals and minerals by some of the world’s most powerful companies, with multibillion-dollar valuations and whose founders and CEOs are household names.
If you own a smartphone, tablet, laptop, e-scooter, electric vehicle (or all of the above), then it is a system in which you are unwittingly complicit. Read More…
