FOCUS: Dig deep and you’ll find a heavy price being paid in Africa for your iPhone
Summary
North London dinner party types love to talk shop about their newest electric car, mobile phone or swanky laptop purchase, but the fight for the raw materials used to build them has led to bloodshed on the ground in Africa. In impoverished countries, the rewards on offer for this type of work can be highly lucrative but the ugly side is dangerous overcrowding of sites, leading to tensions with local law enforcement authorities and questions over whether multinationals are doing enough to tackle the problem. There’s a very real human cost just so that people in the West can have the latest gimmick.” Similar problems have afflicted Acacia Mining’s North Mara gold concession in Tanzania, where tensions between police and miners led to the deaths of dozens of intruders. Experienced South African mining executive Anthony Viljoen said there is little point in using force on the artisanal miners and said it shows that these companies and governments have lost control on the ground. Amnesty has studied the supply chain in DRC in detail and exposed companies like Shanghai-based Congo DongFang International Mining (CDM), which buys cobalt directly from artisanal miners there.