‘Here it is better not to be born’: Cobalt mining for Big Tech is driving child labor, deaths in the Congo
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.
“At no point in human history has so much suffering generated so much profit and been directly linked to the lives of billions of people around the world,” Mr Kara writes in the book.
Around 75 per cent of the world’s cobalt is mined in the DRC — and the world cannot get enough of it. The rare, silvery metal is an essential component to every lithium-ion rechargeable battery, a necessary part of the booming electric vehicle (EV) industry.
The number of EVs are increasing exponentially as most high-polluting economies have made them integral to decarbonising emissions-heavy transport sectors.
There were 7.8 million EVs sold in 2022, according to The Wall Street Journal. That number is set to explode to 66 million by 2040, according to BloombergNEF’s Economic Transition Scenario.