It’s not abundant, just more kids working to dig it up.
Are you going to feed them and build schools?
That's what the economy is doing, in exchange for cobalt.
How much money have you personally donated to the children of Congo?
Short of credible threats of Western military intervention, I don’t see a solution.
We don’t employ those kids. Paying more just lines the pockets of middlemen and warlords. Absent a forced sociopolitical shift combined with a Marshall Plan-scale subsidy regime to elevate the country’s health, education and infrastructure, to make the change sustainable, those kids will be in a bad place.
No, they made it illegal when workers rebelled against the most egregious form of exploitation. Wealthy factory or mine owners didn't grant worker's right out of good will, they were forced to do so because workers paid the price of blood to gain their rights.
And shooting workers was also illegal yet "employers" did exactly that when workers started to strike.
I'm with you there, but the example you gave is very different from the ultra-simplistic example I gave.
They don't "run their economy", it's a failed state, a no man's land ravaged by war which population is being exploited by corrupt multinationals that bribe gangs and warlords for security.
In a poor country kinds are forced to do all kind of dangerous work. If not for cobalt they can be sent to fields and be subject for all chemicals used in modern agriculture. Or work in a sweatshop or in a factory with zero regulations about safety. The fact that they mine cobalt tells that this way more money can be earned than through other dangerous work.
I.e. the problem is that the country is poor. Fix that and kids will spent time in schools, not in mines.
Ohh I absolutely have to. You just justified modern day child slavery. Here’s a radical idea about fixing the poverty: pay them wages that help them uplift from poverty for mining the cobalt. But that’s never happening because you and I will not pay 10k for an iPhone or a million for a Tesla, and that ultimately is where the exploitation starts.
Why are you bringing up child slavery then if you personally justify it?
Australia is a massive cobalt, copper and nickel miner [1]. They do it profitably without kids. The cost of transporting ore out of the DRC probably dwarfs any labor savings from using kids.
Child labor in sub-Saharan African mines is a solvable problem. But it’s not a question of paying more, but engaging in a regional development effort with tinges of nation building of the sort Western voters are fatigued with. (I see no interest in the problem from China.)
With the exception of the Mount Gunson Copper Mine in South Australia, Australia has traditionally dumped cobalt back into the hole as it hasn't been economically viable to separate. At $50k per tonne "tailings" suddenly becomes "valuable resource".
A supply chain is not a black box nobody can look into, even if quite a lot of corporations want you to believe that.
Child labor there are just as terrible, yet most people do not care while reacting strongly on pictures of children mining cobalt. The pictures may well be produced by those who wants to put bad image on electrical cars, not because they cared about children.
The proper solution is to have a careful regulation that heavily tax products from countries with lower safety standards. But this is hard as that makes a lot of things more expensive.
Even in the global north, it's common for it to be legal for your children to be allowed to work on your farm. I struggle to think of a situation there where your children are mining at an economically viable scale that doesn't result in the state taking your children away for abuse.
> "Please do not bring kids. It is irrelevant here and can be even factually wrong."
We should absolutely bring up the kids, since this article talks about the scaling of an industry where the kids play a role in its cheapness. It's very much relevant to the conversation of the price of cobalt.
> "If not for cobalt they can be sent to fields and be subject for all chemicals used in modern agriculture. Or work in a sweatshop or in a factory with zero regulations about safety."
Mining cobalt is much more dangerous than agriculture; even "modern agriculture". Sweatshops come in all forms, some incredibly dangerous, very physically demanding and potentially toxic, like cobalt mining. I wouldn't say they're worse though. Saying so is not being too familiar with how terrible cobalt mining can be [1][2].
It's worth noting though; one can't defend a terrible children's right abuse by claiming that "if they weren't being abused this way they'd be abused another". We don't know that, and it very much doesn't make it ok.
> "I.e. the problem is that the country is poor. Fix that and kids will spent time in schools, not in mines."
Yes, The DRC needs capital to develop and support its population. It's worth understanding the problem with a little more depth, since it's complex.
The DRC has about half of the reserves of one of an incredibly important resource [3]. That's a very significant amount of latent capital. It also has a chokehold on the market, accounting for about 70% of the world's cobalt production [4]. That's power.
One can't just say that The DRC "is poor"; it is being "kept poor" by internal conflict largely enabled and stirred by outsiders (I quickly found some examples from a few years back but there's way more: [5][6]). It's also victim to an international community that says and does nothing about this, because the international community benefits a lot from the poverty in The DRC.
That's why we should talk about the children. For years African analysts have noted that the USA cares about "liberating" countries human rights abuses in some parts of the world, yet is very confortable with tyrannical dictators in others [7]. I don't know how much the West would hurt its own economic interests based on public outcry, but we should absolutely acknowledge the fact this is not ok, and Western (in the very least) indifference plays a role in it.
[1]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/a394gp/smartphones-child-lab...
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/commentisfree...
[3]: https://www.kitco.com/news/2022-02-17/The-world-s-largest-co...
[4]: https://investingnews.com/where-is-cobalt-mined/
[5]: https://youtu.be/tEOmI5bc3HU?t=68
But I am not so sure about authoritarian regimes or tirany. South Korea and Taiwan 70 years ago were poorer that most African countries, have used child labor very extensively and had dictatorships when in Africa there were democracies at least on papers. Now these are the first world countries with working democracies. Even in China, when people became richer they started to care about environment and there were even protests again really bad pollution cases and there is much less child labor than 50 years ago. Yet Africa continues to be poor and use child labor extensively.
So perhaps some tyrannies are not so bad long-term.