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

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Conditions were adversarial at every turn, including aggressive security forces, intense surveillance, the remoteness of many mining areas, distrust of outsiders, and the sheer scale of hundreds of thousands of people engaged in the feverish excavation of cobalt in medieval conditions. There is a vast disparity between the companies that sell products containing cobalt and the people who dig it out of the ground. The mining companies and cooperatives are mostly owned by the Chinese who don’t give a damn about the working conditions of the artisanal miners. Part of the RMI’s platform includes a Responsible Minerals Assurance Process that purports to support independent, third-party assessments of cobalt supply chains and to monitor cobalt mining sites in the DRC for child labor.

Some of the most transformative advancements in human civilization would not have been possible without gouging the earth for minerals and metals. The Copper Belt is a metallogenic wonder that contains vast mineral riches, including 10 percent of the world’s copper and about half the world’s cobalt reserves. Foreign powers have penetrated every inch of this nation to extract its rich supplies of ivory, palm oil, diamonds, timber, rubber … and to make slaves of its people.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. The influx of mineral wealth from the New World, especially gold, financed much of the Renaissance, leading to the Industrial Revolution, which gave birth to the modern mining industry. The Congolese military and other security forces are omnipresent in mining areas, making access to mining sites dangerous and at times impossible.

Occupying the entire heart of the African continent, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is an extraordinary land teeming with nature.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). In the studies we conducted, the artisanal miners have more than forty times the amount of cobalt in their urine as the control groups.