The True Cost of Your New Christmas Laptop? Ask the Eastern Congolese

[unhappycamper]

The True Cost of Your New Christmas Laptop? Ask the Eastern Congolese
by Madeleine Bunting
Published on Monday, December 13, 2010 by The Guardian/UK

Inside the laptop on which I'm writing this column are tiny quantities of tin used to solder parts on the circuit board. I've used my mobile roughly 20 times in the course of my research, calling the US, the Democratic Republic of Congo and researchers in London; I know it's the small element of another crucial mineral, tantalum, that ensures that my mobile phone doesn't lose its memory when the battery goes dead. Both the tin and the tantalum are contributing their part to making my life easier and my work more effective. The painful paradox is that these minerals help make the lives of thousands of eastern Congolese agonisingly wretched.

The minerals are dug by hand from remote mines, often by forced labour. Conditions are dangerous and accidents frequent. Many mines are directly controlled either by corrupt army commanders or armed rebel groups – the difference between the two is perilously hard to pin down. The ores are carried in sacks on porters' backs for up to 45 kilometres to airstrips; at every stage of the process "taxes" and tolls are extracted. Global Witness in a report published tomorrow calculated that the revenue from the major Congolese mining area at Bisie could be in the region of $30m a year. With so much money at stake, conflict over control of these assets is brutal, and the terrorising of civilian populations through rape and murder has become routine.

That much is clear, so what can be done about it? How can I be sure that if I buy a new mobile phone for Christmas it's not contributing to this hell? (My 10-year-old phone is now deemed vintage, such is the pace of electronic consumer fashion.) Millions of sleek, glossy, elegantly designed laptops and mobile phones will end up as presents under Christmas trees all over the globe in the next few weeks, and how will we know what they have really cost?

What lies between my laptop in London and the mines in the three eastern provinces of Congo is an immensely complex entanglement of economics and politics. Think of how kite strings can get tangled and take hours, even days, to unravel and you have the right metaphorical image. This is globalisation in which supply chains crisscross continents, passing from company to company, and at every stage every player has an interest in obfuscation: either blatantly on the ground in Congo, where huge quantities of this million dollar trade are illegal; or closer to home with the polite refusal to engage, the citing of commercial confidentiality.

The obfuscation is hugely convenient. For nearly 15 years of this civil war too many links in the chain have hidden behind the convenience of ignorance: "We just don't know; we can't be sure." It's the excuse that the electronics industry has used; it's the excuse us consumers use. It's the excuse put forward by the traders – known as comptoirs – in the trading centres of Kivu, by the truck drivers transiting Rwanda and by the big smelting companies in China and Malaysia who supply the world's electronic manufacturers. Nor is it entirely unjustified; Congo accounts for only 6% of the world's tin and between 9% and 18% of its tantalum. The huge smelting operations suck in raw materials from all over the world; every electronic product, aeroplane and car could carry traces of conflict minerals.

[The Straight Story]

1. Second hand effects of laptops

Ban em in bars, problem solved :evilgrin: