Congo - specifically The Democratic Republic of the Congo - is cursed with abundant resources yet the inability to benefit from them. In the late 19th Century it was rubber, for newly invented tyres for the newly invented car. King Leopold II of Belgium managed to acquire the country as his own personal property in order to ruthlessly exploit its rubber and its people. Then it was copper. Now it is cobalt, of which Congo has the majority of the world’s known reserves. The resources change, the identities of the exploiters change, but the situation remains. Utter brutalisation and exploitation of the Congolese people, profiting corrupt officials at all levels and foreign businesses.
Cobalt is an essential requirement for rechargeable batteries. There was demand enough when that meant laptops and phones, but now it means EV cars too, with far larger batteries requiring a thousand times as much cobalt as a phone battery. Thus the demand will go up and so will the exploitation. Kara provides graphic and extensive detail of this exploitation. ‘Artisanal mining’ - which sounds lovely, a bit like artisanal sourdough - is mining by hand. Digging up ore by hand, washing it by hand, bagging it by hand. Done without safety equipment, in poisonous water, in unsupported tunnels, with babies on backs, the risk of rape for women and girls, the risk of a bullet in the back for all if you try and sell your ore to the wrong buyer. The certainty in the long-run of a crippling injury for someone in the family, meaning the difference between sending a child to school so that one day they can escape, and drawing them inexorably in because the family can’t eat otherwise.
Not only is the work awful, there is no escape. There is no choice in the matter. If cobalt is discovered near your village, it will be a mine soon. Any farmland or fishing will be pulled up or poisoned so there will be no other way to make a living other than digging for ore. And if your village isn’t yet a mine then soldiers may come and round you up and take you to a mine and force you to dig anyway. And there is no hope of kids getting through school. It should be free but the government keeps failing to pay the teachers, so there are fees and families simply can’t afford to get children enough schooling for them to reach escape velocity before they are pulled in by the gravitational field of cobalt.
Kara also talks at length about how it is impossible to have ‘clean cobalt’. Fundamentally it is all just so many units of ore, and the bagged ore from the artisanal miners gets bought by local dealers and bunged straight into the treatment chain with all the mechanically mined material. Despite his clear eyed view of the situation as it stands, I found Kara’s views on resolving the issue rather lacking (maybe it is impossible). He talks about the ‘model mines’ where standards are supposed to be higher. They were somewhat better - no obvious kids, some PPE, and women reported that they no longer felt at risk of sexual assault - but they still earned the same pittance. The model mines (or one of the two, I can’t remember) shut during the writing of the book. In his Joe Rogan podcast - thoroughly recommend you listen to it even if you also read the book - he talked about how surely the consumer facing tech companies could afford PPE down the supply chain? I don’t see how that would work. If the mandate for PPE came at the top of the supply chain it would have to be respected at each of the many levels all the way down to the bottom, and if the ‘model mines’ can’t stay open then that isn’t going to happen either.
He spoke of research into cobalt-free batteries. But Congo seems to have a multitude of ores in a fairly unique geology, so if cobalt demand reduces something else will replace it, just as the cobalt replaced copper which replaced rubber. Perhaps the best thing is to give the Congolese people options. If they can have another means of earning a living, then they won’t be so desperate to dig ore, which means pay and standards would have to rise to make it attractive. I don’t know what that other means could possibly be, and it is of course compounded by how the mining displaces all else in the area. But it could add an extra route to ameliorating the problem, because the demand isn’t going anywhere.
Kara’s bravery and compassion makes for a compelling story, and one I am at a loss as to how to practically respond to. I won’t be buying an EV any time soon although I had already made that decision prior to reading this book. I hate upgrading my phone but I already avoid that for as long as possible anyway. What should I do? What would you do?