Code red in the global supply chain

Siddharth Kara's thought-provoking book exposes the exploitation inherent in the extraction of cobalt, a mineral crucial to modern technology, and the injustices faced by the people of Congo

Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers our Lives

Author: Siddharth Kara

Publisher: St Martin’s Press (Pan Macmillan)

Pages: 274

Price: Rs 599

When you use your smartphone, turn on your laptop or congratulate yourself on your wokeness for owning an electric vehicle, you are unlikely to be thinking of cobalt, a mineral critical to these gadgets. Siddharth Kara’s book Cobalt Red does more than remind you of this fact. He uncovers in unsparingly uncomfortable detail the gross human and environmental degradation at the bottom of a supply chain that powers the world economy. In another age, this system was known as slavery.
 
Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), especially the south east province of Katanga, holds more reserves of cobalt than the rest of the planet combined. In 2021, the region accounted for over 70 per cent of global supplies. The region is also rich in other valuable natural resources —iron, zinc, tin, nickel and manganese to uranium, gold, silver and nickel — apart from timber, rubber and ivory. Each of these prompted a scramble among world powers at various times, keeping the people of the Congo, a former personal colony of King Leopold II (1835-1909), in a state of bondage.
 
Their predicament was famously captured by Joseph Conrad’s powerful 1899 novella Heart of Darkness,  which first drew the world’s attention to the depredations in the Congo. Little changed when the colony was transferred to Belgium. Portraying this history in greater detail is Adam Hochschild’s 1998 history King Leopold’s Ghost, which I coincidentally finished reading just before Cobalt Red arrived. Mr Kara’s book is a grim, updated continuum to Mr Hochschild’s classic. 
 
Occasional pious pronouncements aside, the Great Powers felt no need to conceal the exploitative nature of their colonial enterprises. This position did not change after DRC gained independence in 1960. Its first president Patrice Lumumba was assassinated by a United States-led initiative because of his left-leaning politics that sought to harness the wealth accruing from DRC’s abundant natural resources for the benefit of its people. Since then, DRC has been at the mercy of a series of Western-supported kleptocrats, amassing abundant personal wealth in the course of protecting Western corporate interests at the cost of their own people. One of John Le Carre’s better post-Cold War novels, The Mission Song, evocatively captures this cycle of cynical geo-politics.   
 
The latest frenzy to extract cobalt to power lithium-ion rechargeable batteries is no different but Mr Kara exposes the hypocrisy at the top of the chain, quoting at length smooth PR statements from Apple, Samsung, Daimler, Tesla and Glencore (the metals traders with large mining interests in the DRC). All underline their commitment to protecting the well -being of people mining cobalt and the environment in the mining areas. Two international mining coalitions were created to ensure that supply chains were clean. Mr Kara’s journeys through the hellscapes of Katanga in 2018, 2019 and 2021 exposes at first hand all these pronouncements as a crock of lies. He visited multiple mines and painstakingly interviewed scores of those who risked their lives  — including children as young as 10  — to make a dollar or two a day to sustain themselves. This story of the journey of cobalt “from toxic pit to shiny showroom”, of maimed bodies, violated women and people crushed to death under collapsing mines, forms the core of the book. Though necessarily repetitive, the picture of people subsisting in “stone age conditions” does not cease to shock.
 
At the heart of this particular darkness is Artisanal and Small Scale Mining (ASM). To quote Mr Kara, “Do not be fooled into thinking ASM involves pleasant mining activities conducted by skilled artisans.” They work with rudimentary tools and in hazardous conditions — apparently the system prevails in 80 countries in the global south. Because ASM is almost entirely informal, miners rarely have formal agreements for wages and working conditions. ASM accounts for 30 per cent of all cobalt mining in DRC, though based on his travels,
 
Mr Kara suggests that this is an underestimate. Too many of the ASM sites subsist around formal mining concessions which maintain the fiction of an arms-length relationship by buying products only from negociantes middlemen who buy ASM produce at rock-bottom prices and transport them to company depots.
 
The new colonialists in DRC are the Chinese, who form joint ventures with state-owned Gecamines and dominate the cobalt supply chain from mining to refining. These concessions are protected by DRC security forces, and the contracts work disproportionately in favour of the mining companies, with rentier local politicians pocketing large sums. In 2021, Mr Kara writes, China produced 75 per cent of the world’s refined cobalt — much of the processing is done in China because, ironically, DRC lacks the electricity to do so. The single largest refiner, Huayou Cobalt, has a global market share of 22 per cent. The principal producers of lithium-ion batteries are Chinese with one company alone accounting for a third of the world market. No surprise, like countless colonists before them, they consider the Congolese feckless and lazy.   
 
Mr Kara’s prose is eloquent but unadorned; the facts he uncovers make hyperbole unnecessary. He highlights the basic problem that assails kleptocracies of the DRC type that deny their people the benefits of the natural resources in their lands. Current president Felix Tshisekedi, a protégé of former dictator Joseph Kabila, appears to have bucked his predecessor’s practices and is reopening mining contracts with Chinese firms to make them more equitable. Where this exercise will take him is unclear; at this time, he has the weight of history against him.