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Date: April 30, 2024 Tue
Time: 3:21 am
Time: 3:21 am
Results for armed conflict (congo)
2 results foundAuthor: Bagwell, John Title: Getting to Conflict-Free: Assessing Corporate Action on Conflict Minerals Summary: Violent conflict has persisted in eastern Congo for more than a decade and a half, causing more death than any war since World War II. Although Congo’s conflict stems from long-standing grievances, the trade in conflict minerals provides the primary fuel for the conflict. Worth hundreds of millions of dollars per year, the conflict minerals trade provides incentives for rebel groups, militias, and criminal networks within the Congolese army to control strategic mines and trading routes through patterns of violent extraction and deeply exploitative behavior. Minerals extracted from eastern Congo—the ores that produce tin, tantalum, tungsten, or the 3Ts, and gold—are essential to the electronics devices we use and depend on every day. Tin is used as solder on circuit boards in every electronic device we use; tantalum stores electricity and is essential to portable electronics and high-speed processing devices; tungsten enables cell phone vibration alerts; and gold is not only made into jewelry, but is also used in the wiring of electronic devices. These minerals are central to the technologies that have allowed our culture to thrive and that drive our businesses, our communications infrastructure, our social engagement, and our national security. With this in mind, two years ago the Enough Project initiated engagement with major electronics companies on conflict minerals, writing to 21 consumer electronics industry leaders to call their attention to this issue and inquire about the steps they were taking to ensure their products were conflict-free. Our objective was to have companies at the top of the minerals supply chain use their buying power to influence their suppliers, exerting pressure down the supply chain, a model of change that has had success in the apparel, forestry, and diamond sectors. Since then, we have seen dramatic changes, including the passage of conflict minerals legislation in the United States, and an evolving multilateral architecture for supply chain due diligence from the United Nations and OECD. We have also seen a host of efforts initiated by companies, governments, and NGOs, both in Congo and internationally, to trace supply chains back to their sources, independently audit chains-of-custody, and conceptualize certification schemes similar to the Kimberley Process for conflict diamonds. Enough has engaged with industry-wide efforts, specifically the work of the Electronics Industry Citizenship Coalition/Global e-Sustainability Initiative, or EICC-GeSI Extractives Working Group, because it “aggregates the commercial leverage,” as the chief operating officer of a major electronics company told us. However, as we have observed and as this report details, absent sustained leadership from individual companies, industry-wide efforts can also lead to a lowest common denominator response incommensurate to the scale and urgency of the issue. Individual actions by companies have a critical role in buttressing industry efforts through supply chain tracing, contractual obligations, and supporting certification. Enough presents an initial ranking on the progress made by the 21 electronics companies with whom we have engaged in this survey. The report focuses on the efforts within the industry to address the conflict minerals issue and also assesses the response of other industries that are reliant on the 3Ts and gold. These rankings are an effort to provide consumers with the information they need to purchase responsibly, as well as a means of encouraging companies to continue to move forward in good faith. We are hopeful that as the rankings are updated in subsequent reports, scores will improve along with methodology as the process for tracing, auditing, and conflict-free certification evolves. Details: Washington, DC: The Enough Project, 2010. 19p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed October 7, 2012 at http://www.enoughproject.org/files/corporate_action-1.pdf Year: 2010 Country: Congo, Democratic Republic URL: http://www.enoughproject.org/files/corporate_action-1.pdf Shelf Number: 126636 Keywords: Armed Conflict (Congo)Conflict Minerals (Congo) |
Author: Enough Project Title: From Child Miner to Jewelry Story: The Six Steps of Congo's Conflict Gold Summary: The conflict-gold rush is thriving in eastern Congo. Because of its skyrocketing price and the ease of smuggling it in small pouches for extremely high profits, gold has become the most lucrative conflict mineral for armed groups in eastern Congo. More than $600 million worth of gold is estimated to leave Congo every year, and armed groups are funding their operations through control of a significant percentage of that amount. As U.S. legislation and supply-chain pressure from tech companies have made it more difficult for them to sell the more cumbersome so-called 3-T minerals—tin, tantalum, and tungsten—rebels and army commanders have increasingly turned to gold. Guided by war criminal Gen. Bosco “The Terminator” Ntaganda, who is the subject of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant, the leaders of the new Rwandan-supported M23 rebellion ran an extensive conflict gold smuggling ring in 2011 but was disrupted from this in mid-2012 following Ntaganda’s defection from Congo’s army. M23 is now attempting to retake control of the trade, as it builds alliances with the warlords in control of gold mining areas. Other warlord groups, from the Rwandan Hutu Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda to Congolese army generals, have also mined and smuggled gold and continue to trade gold for arms. As the price of gold has hit record levels over the past five years, new gold mines filled with child miners as young as 8 years old have sprung up in Congo, and armed groups are fighting over mines and trading routes. There is a six-step process for getting conflict gold from mines in eastern Congo into its final form: jewelry or gold bars for investors. At the mines, the gold is mainly dug up by hand with pick-axes and shovels in dangerous shafts as far as 100 yards into the earth. Fewer than 5 percent of miners are registered with the authorities, and an estimated 40 percent are children. Armed groups and/or army commanders control a majority of mines, forcing miners to work, taking cuts from the miners, and/or taxing traders along supply routes. An estimated 5 tons to 7 tons of gold are produced in the Kivu region of eastern Congo annually—worth between $285 million and $400 million, a large percentage of which ends up in the hands of armed groups that target civilians with rape, murder, and other abuses. Details: Washington, DC: Enough Project, Center for American Progress, 2012. 20p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed November 12, 2012 at http://www.enoughproject.org/files/Conflict-Gold.pdf Year: 2012 Country: Congo, Republic of the URL: http://www.enoughproject.org/files/Conflict-Gold.pdf Shelf Number: 126922 Keywords: Armed Conflict (Congo)Child Exploitation (Congo)Child Labor (Congo)Conflict Minerals, Gold (Congo)Illicit Mineral Trade (Congo)Minerals (Congo)Natural Resources (Congo) |