“We need to educate the country,” Hall said in a phone interview Friday. Hall is helping lead a campaign to halt child labor in the extraction of cobalt, which he sees as a matter of life and death.
Hall, now 84, is scheduled to testify about the problem before the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa Tuesday.
“This is a big human rights issue,” the former Dayton congressman said. “It doesn’t seem to be related to the United States, but when you consider it — it does."
The crisis, as Hall and his allies see it: Lithium batteries, which need cobalt, power cell phones, tablets, electric vehicles and a host of other devices in our everyday lives. Much of that cobalt is mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where according to the U.S. Blood Battery campaign, more than 40,000 children are forced to work in deadly conditions, mining with bare hands for as little as $2.50 each day.
“Some of the children, you’re not going to believe this, are three years old,” Hall said. “The median age is like 6, 7, 8, 9 years old.”
These are children working 12 hours a day, seven days a week, living — and sometimes dying — for the convenience of consumers, he and his allies contend.
The DRC is home to 70% of the world’s supply of cobalt. “It’s a good portion of our life,” Hall said. “You can’t pick up a smart phone without having cobalt in it.”
Many of these mines collapse. In a recent collapse of a coltan mine in the eastern DRC, some 200 workers died, many of them women and children, according to a report in The Guardian.
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
Coltan is processed into tantalum, a metal used in mobile phones, computers, aerospace components and more.
“It’s in our iPhones,” Hall said. It’s in our rechargeable batteries. It’s in our vehicles. It’s in everything around us, and most of us don’t know that."
Hall represented Dayton in the Ohio Statehouse before serving as congressman in Ohio’s 3rd Congressional District from 1979 to 2002. He was also the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture from 2002 to 2006.
He also launched the Hall Hunger Initiative in late 2015 to focus on hunger in the Miami Valley. And he was an integral part of the campaign against “blood diamonds” — diamonds whose sales funded African wars.
A Kettering native, Hall is the son of Dave Hall, former mayor of Dayton. Today, he lives in Florida.
About the Author
