COMMENTARY

Blood on Your Mobile?

Dev Nathan, Sandip Sarkar

The question of establishing a value chain in mobile phones that is free of coltan (a mineral used in capacitors, essential for these phones) is not only one of tracing the path of supply of this mineral. Traceability needs to be backed by measures to support artisanal miners through local facilitation centres and nance, and with steps to establish a credible state, one responsible to its citizens, including the miners.

This note is based on the Scoping Study for the study of the raw materials segment of mobile telecommunications as part of the research on economic and social upgrading in global production, under the Capturing the Gains research project, funded by DFID and coordinated at the Brooks World Poverty Institute of the University of Manchester. Dev Nathan (nathandev@hotmail.com) and Sandip Sarkar (delhisandip@gmail.com) are with the Institute for Human Development, New Delhi.

lood diamonds are well known, but what about blood mobiles? This preliminary look into the global production of mobile phones revealed the critical link between armed factions, poverty and violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and mobile phone users worldwide. This is coltan, or columbite tantalite, the raw material for tantalum, a mineral used in capacitors, which are essential to mobile phones, computers and other electronic quipment. Coltan constitutes only about 1% of the value of all raw materials contained in mobile phones. But its importance cannot be underestimated. Coltans capacitance property allows the storage and virtually instantaneous release of electric charge with a minimal loss of power. It is this quality which makes coltan so critical to the mobile phone industry, indeed, to computers and all electronics. More than 30% of the worlds supply of coltan is mined in the eastern part of the DRC and the Great Lakes region (United States Geological Survey 2010: 173), much of it by tens of thousands of artisanal miners, many of whom are children. In the Congo, the mining and marketing of coltan (as well as gold, tin and other minerals) are controlled by both governmentbacked and private military-commercial complexes, involving traders, nanciers and armed soldiers (Raeymaeker 2002). The mobile telecommunications system is a complicated global production network (GPN) by different rms, spanning different countries. This consists of: (1) hardware production (mobile phones and network infrastructure); (2) software production (operating systems and mobile applications); (3) sales and marketing of telecommunications hardware and software; (4) mobile telecom services; (5) end use of phones by consumers; and (6) afteruse (waste-handling). Colton enters into the production chain in the rst stage, as an element in hardware production. The boom in the mobile phone industry should bring considerable benets
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to those involved in coltan mining. But at present, this is not the case. The Committee of Experts formed by the UN Security Council (2008) to enquire into the continuing war in the DRC (dubbed by Prunier (2009) as Africas World War) made it clear that, rather than bringing benets to the miners in the DRC, coltan has been fuelling a deadly conict between the armies of central African governments and private militias in the region. In this conict, rape of women as an instrument of control is so well established that the eastern region of the Congo, the coltan region, has been labelled the rape capital of the world by the UN Special Rapporteur on Sexual Violence in Conict (Wallstrom 2010). The Congolese army (FADC) itself has been named by Human Rights Watch (2009) as the number one perpetrator of rape and sexual assaults on women in the eastern Congo.

Actors in the Conict Coltan Chain

In the Congo, mining of coltan is carried out in some 200 mines. But the vast majority of coltan is mined in small artisanal operations.1 Since coltan is often found near the surface, it is easily mined by farmers turned diggers.2 The miners earn from $1 and $5 per day, which is not even 10% of the local value of the coltan (and other minerals) they mine (Pendergrast and Lezhnev 2009: 2). Of the 13 major mines, 12 are controlled by armed groups, including units of the Congolese army (FADC); FDLR (Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda), a Rwandan-Hutu militia led by organisers of the 1994 Rwandan genocide; and their opponents, National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP), linked to the Rwandan regime. Smallscale, artisanal mining is often controlled by small, locally-based armed groups or militias, collectively called the mai mai. The larger armed units and the mai mai both tax the mines directly and indirectly extort money or minerals at the checkpoints they control. Miners wages, although small, are important to the local economy. A new type of informal economy is developing around coltan (and other minerals). Coltan fever has rapidly dollarised many relatively remote rural areas (Jackson 2002: 528). Along with the mining and violence,
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sexual and otherwise, many secondary activities have developed prostitution, brewing and petty commerce of all types. Women, at work in the elds and mines and elsewhere, are particularly abused and raped by either the soldiers or the mai mai. A woman from Gisenyi summed it up, Those who are not killed by the soldiers of the former army are killed by those of the new army. It is always the innocent ones who are the victims (Prunier 2009: 174). There is little difference, other than in scale, between the state and non-state armed units. Amnesty International concluded that under the pretext of ghting their opponents, all parties to the conict are killing, looting, and extorting on a massive scale and subjecting the entire population to terror and misery (Amnesty International 2000, quoted in Jackson 2002: 527). Some of these armed units are nanced by traders, with the chain of nancial advances going right back to European and other commercial houses and coltan processors (IPIS 2002). The traders, using this nance, provide advances to the miners which places them in a state of bondage. Many of the miners are child labourers, some working from the age of eight. Coltan and other minerals (including tin) are sold by artisanal miners, more or less on the spot, to merchants, called negociants in French. They are merchant-aggregators who then transport the minerals by truck or even small planes, to the trading houses or exporters. The buyer-transporters function as agents of the trading houses and are often paid in advance by them. The trading houses are located in the towns of Goma and Bukavu. There are about 100 such trading houses in each of the two towns. They are supposed to be registered with the Congolese government, but most of them are not. The trading houses buy from the negociants and, in turn, sell to the exporters or comptoirs. The exporters sort the minerals and then sell the coltan to foreign buyers. These exporters are registered with the Congolese government (17 in Bukavu and 24 in Goma). The exporters nance the trading houses, and, in turn, most are given advances by the international traders from Belgium, Malaysia, Kazakhstan, and other countries. Air transportation has played a key role in transporting conict materials, including coltan. Ironically, the same air
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transport companies also take in humanitarian aid to the affected countries and regions (Grifths and Bromley 2009). Although neighbouring countries, such as Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi also have small deposits of coltan,3 the bulk of their exports come from the Congo, channelled through their own armed units or armed units allied to them. Rwanda is a preferred exit point as the export tax from DRC is greater than from Rwanda or Uganda. Prots of up to $20 million per month are said to have sustained the Rwandan army (Ma 2009: 2). Just three smelter-processors buy 80% of the ore: the US Cabot Corporation; German H C Stark and the Chinese Ningxia Corporation. After the 2008 UN Security Resolution on conict minerals from the DRC, both Cabot and Stark announced that they would not use DRC coltan.4 But as of date, Ningxia continues to do so. Data (International Trade Center 2010) show that China is now the primary consumer of DRCs coltan, accounting for 80% of its exports in 2008, with some DRC coltan found in materials processed in Kazakhstan. Since traceability has not yet been established and given that materials are mixed together at different stages along the supply chain, it is very likely that coltan from the Congo enters into raw materials processed by the US and German smelters. Coltan from the smelters is used in the manufacture of capacitors. The major manufacturers are Kemet and Vishay in the US, AVX in the UK, NEC in Japan and Samsung in South Korea. The capacitors are integrated into circuit boards by wellknown electronics manufacturers, such as Sony, Toshiba, Samsung, HP and the major chip manufacturers such as Intel and AMD. The circuit boards and computer chips then end up in the mobile phones manufactured by Nokia, Siemens, Motorola, Samsung, etc. All in all, coltan goes through a fairly extensive supply chain before it ends up in the mobile phones we all use.

Failure of Governance
The UNs conict minerals policy requires that the source of all materials is revealed and that minerals should not be secured from conict areas. When coltan ore is brought to the buyer-transporters and trading houses in separate sacks or other
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containers, it would be easy to identify the geographic source of the ore by the colour and texture of the container. However, this is not done. Instead, all that the trading houses do is to ask whether the coltan came from a conict area. And, of course, it is easy to lie about this. In 2008, the UN blacklisted some exporters linked with the FDLR and armed militias, for dealing in conict coltan (and other minerals). But the absence of enforcement makes it easy for minerals from conict zones to be moved around the blacklists and into the supply chain at this stage. Coltan is smuggled across the Congolese border into Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi, where no questions are asked about the source of the mineral. Indeed, in Rwanda, the state, through the military and the Department of Congo Affairs, is reported to be directly involved in the coltan trade. In Uganda and Burundi, private, non-state actors and individuals from the armed forces are involved in the coltan trade. As in many other parts of A frica, such as the Cameroon-Chad border (Roitman 2004), a coalition of private businesses nances the coltan trade, in conjunction with military personnel and border customs ofcials. Faced with criticism of its re-export of conict coltan, the Government of Rwanda has now started a programme to certify the origin of Rwandas own mineral production. It remains to be seen to what extent this has any effect on mixing of Congolese with Rwandan coltan. Other neighbouring countries, however, do not even have such a programme of certication. Reners form the crucial link in the coltan supply chain, four of which are the major reners in the US, Germany, China and Kazakhstan. This is the key point where the governance of the coltan supply chain could be effectively strengthened. Once the ore is rened and turned into dust or wire, there is no way of tracing the source of supply. The circuit board, chip, and the mobile phone manufacturers, therefore, have to rely on the reners to trace the supply chain of their components. There are two major global corporate initiatives that require next-tier suppliers to implement industry codes. One is the Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition

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(EICC) which includes 40 global electronic companies but raw materials sourcing is excluded from the EICC Code of Conduct.5 The second is the Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI) which covers total supply chain governance and includes the leading Information and Communication Technology (ICT) companies. GeSI recognise civil society campaigns such as MakeITFair which have highlighted social, environmental and humanitarian issues associated with the extraction of certain metals used in the production of ICT equipment particularly in the DRC.6 The efforts of EICC and GeSI in auditing coltan use mineral tagging or nger printing to trace the source. The audit process, even if well-implemented with third party involvement, would only certify that the coltan coming up the supply chain is not sourced from DRCs or other conict-ridden mines. But merely establishing traceability at the smelter or processor levels will not release the miners from bondage relations with traders and armed intermediaries. On the contrary, to the extent that the supply chain is cleaned in this manner, it would quickly impoverish the tens of thousands of miners families as small, artisanal miners in conict-zones are cut out and tracked purchase is restricted to the bigger mines. For many diggers, even after the 2001 crash in price and the rationalisation of production, coltan remains the only survival strategy in response to a local economy profoundly destroyed by war (Jackson 2002: 231). If better traceability stopped the coltan owing from the DRC, the result would be further destitution of the miners and their dependents.

From Corporations to the State

Consequently, social upgrading, or the concern for the livelihoods of artisanal miners in the Congo, requires more than corporate governance measures. It is necessary to deal with the complex political economy of conict in the Great Lakes Region. The larger armed units of states and the small armed groups (mai mai) both tax the mines and extort money or minerals at the checkpoints they control. As Keen (1998) puts it, twisting the Clausewitzian maxim, war is economics by other means. There are two factors in this situation. On

the one side, those who are supposed to be the agencies of the state, namely the armed forces of the DRC, in this case, use their position to collect some income for themselves, turning what should be state revenue into personal income. On the other side, there is an absence of an effective state that can monopolise the use of force, provide the essential public good of security and establish a monopoly of taxation in return for a guarantee that no one else would impose a tax. In this condition, any armed unit that is able to impose control in a region is able to collect a tax in that region. Conict coltan, like other easily extracted minerals, including alluvial diamonds, both nance and become a reason for armed conict. What this means is that governance of the coltan value chain cannot be just a function of corporations supply chain governance. Other state, civil society and international organisations, would need to be engaged and their legitimacy established. In particular, the matter of establishing state legitimacy could be seen as one of identifying a socially acceptable basis for collective action. This the state alone can provide, but to do this the state must have legitimacy in the eyes of the subject citizens. This is the institutional failure at the root of what is called the resource curse.7 The recent US Financial Services Reform Bill (the Reid-Dodd Bill of 2010) requires all US corporations to disclose what they are doing to ensure that their products do not contain conict minerals. This would add to pressures to clean up the coltan and other conict minerals value chain. But such measures should not just bypass the artisanal miners in conict zones. Rather they should be a supplement to measures that would support states built on power-sharing multi-ethnic coalitions that are necessary to free the artisanal miners and the people of the conict zones from the grip of the various military-commercial complexes. The question of establishing a mobile phone value chain free of conict coltan, thus, is not only one of traceability. Traceability needs to be backed up, rst, with measures to support artisanal miners, through local facilitation centres and nance and, second, and most important,
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with steps to establish a credible state, one responsible to its citizens, including artisanal miners.
Notes
1 The following account of coltan mining in the Congo draws on secondary sources: the UN Security Council, Final Report of the Group of Experts (2008); Raeymaeker (2002); International Peace Information Service (2002): Jackson (2002); Ma (2009); Pendergrast and Lezhnev (2009); Prunier (2009); and Lemarchand (2009). This is similar to the mining of alluvial diamonds in western Africa. In Rwanda and other countries, coltan from the Congo is mixed with local coltan and then sold all together to be transported to the processors. Coltan from DRC could easily, and often does, end up being exported from neighbouring countries. Cabot announced that it would not accept material containing coltan from not just Congo (Brazzaville), and the DRC, but also Zambia, Burundi, or Rwanda (Cabot, Home Page, August 2008). http://www.eicc.info/PDF/EICC%20Code%20of % 20Conduct%20English.pdf accessed on 24 July 2010. The Supply Chain Initiative from http://www. gesi.org/Initiatives/SupplyChain/tabid/75/ Default.aspx, accessed on 24 July 2010. See Paul Collier (2009).

2 3 4

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References
Collier, Paul (2009): Wars, Guns and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places (New York: Harper). Grifths, Hugh and Mark Bromley (2009): Air Transport and Destabilising Commodity Flows, SIPRI Policy, Paper No 24. Human Rights Watch (2009): You Will Be Punished: Attacks on Civilians in Eastern Congo, www.hrw. org, 13 December, accessed on 9 October 2010. International Peace Information Service (2002): Supporting the War Economy in the DRC: European Companies and the Coltan Trade, www.ipis.org. International Trade Center (2010): Trade Data, www. itc.org, accessed on 27 July 2010. Jackson, Stephen (2002): Making a Killing: Criminality and Coping in the Kivu War Economy, Review of African Political Economy, 93-94, September-December. Keen, David (1998): The Economic Functions of Violence in Civil Wars, Adelphi Paper No 320, The International Institute of Strategic Studies, London. Lemarchand, Rene (2009): The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). Ma, Tiffany (2009): China and Congos Coltan Connection, Project 2049 Institute. Pendergrast, John and Sasha Lezhnev (2009): From Mine to Mobile Phone: The Conict Minerals Supply Chain, www.enoughproject.org. Prunier, Gerard (2009): Africas World War (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press). Raeymaeker, Tim (2002): Network War: An Introduction to Congos Privatised War Economy, Inter national Peace Information Service. Roitman, Janet (2004): Productivity in the Margins: The Reconstitution of State Power in the Chad Basin in Veena Das and Deborah Poole (ed.), Anthropology in the Margins of the State (Delhi: Oxford University Press). United Nations Security Council (2008): Final Report of the Group of Experts on the Democratic Republic of Congo, S/2008/773. United States Geological Survey (USGS) (2010): Report, www.usgs.org (accessed on 5 September 2010). Wallstrom, Margaret (2010): UN Special Rapporteur on Sexual Violence in Conict, Statement on the BBC, 28 April, 17:50, UK (accessed on 1 September 2010).
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