Parents face the heartbreaking question - do I send my child to school or do we eat today? The money the work brings in can mean the difference between a meal or an empty plate.
Whole families toil in this dangerous work, spending their days doing backbreaking work in contaminated water, breathing air dusty from dirt and grit. Simply touching cobalt is hazardous, causing neurological diseases and cancers. The mines lack basic safety considerations, leading to children crawling in tunnels without support beams and ventilation shafts. Mothers tell of children who have lost limbs or died as tons of rock collapse on them. They take all these risks for a couple of dollars a day, just to avoid starving.
It’s a tragedy most of the world doesn’t know about yet we are all connected to because of our reliance on technology using cobalt. I recently was asked to join the effort to end this cruelty because of its similarity to the campaign to stop blood diamonds. I went to London and the Netherlands earlier this year to learn more and connect with some amazing people dedicated to helping these children and their families.
I learned that most of the mines are owned by China, with cobalt going from the Congo to China, where it is refined and sold. The exploitative practices in these two countries keep the prices so low, it’s almost impossible to compete. The only site in the US closed recently because they couldn’t come close to matching the overseas prices, kept artificially low because of child labor and unsafe conditions.
It’s encouraging to see international organizations coming together to address this issue and I have been asked to serve as Honorary Chair of the Blood Battery Campaign. We are working with the British Parliament as well as the US Congress. We recognize that cobalt is needed and we aren’t trying to stop the mining, simply end the cruel conditions and especially the abusive use of children as young as three years old forced into this unsafe work.
Congressman Chris Smith, a Republican from New Jersey has proposed the initial legislation to stop cobalt mining with children in the Congo. His legislation would basically require the president to certify on an annual basis that any vehicle coming into the country with cobalt was made without the use of child labor. And his legislation doesn’t just impact vehicles, it would bar all cobalt imports originating from the Congo unless they can show clear and convincing evidence that they were not using child labor. It would also require the Department of Homeland Security to provide documentation of the supply chain.
I know we can do this because we did it with blood diamonds. Big companies told us it would be impossible to trace the diamonds and I said we can track a piece of cheese to the source, we can track a bottle of wine to the source, of course we can track diamonds. And the same goes today for cobalt.
We can stop this abuse. I encourage everyone to write to our elected officials to support HR 2310, the COBALT Supply Chain Act. These children that are suffering and dying may be thousands of miles away but my faith teaches me that they are just as important as the children in our neighborhood. Our phones and computers are driving this tragedy and we need to work together to end the cruelty.
Ambassador Tony Hall is a former Dayton congressman and the founder of the Hall Hunger Initiative.
