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Middle East & Africa
The Economist July 9th 2022
Congo
Either ore
KO LWEZI AND FUNGURUME
How the world depends on small cobalt miners
A
t first glance the dust-caked men carrying sacks of rocks into a trading depot outside Kolwezi, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (drc), have little in common with “Avon ladies” selling cosmetics in the rich world. But in both cases, the more you flog, the better the bonuses. At the depot industrious miners who hit production targets get bumper perks such as a bag of maize meal or a television. The ultimate prize is the cobalt that will be extracted from the rock. An essential component of batteries in phones, laptops and electric cars, which are now the biggest source of demand, cobalt is at the heart of the green economy. Its consumption is expected to rise six-fold by 2050, according to the authors of an imf paper published last year. However, they also noted that cobalt supply could be a bottleneck in the move to cleaner energy. To understand why, consider Congo’s copper belt, from which 60-70% of the world’s cobalt is extracted (see map on next
page). Most of Congo’s cobalt is a by-product of large copper mines which cannot quickly increase their output and have little incentive to do so unless copper prices also rise. The other big source of supply in Congo is so-called “artisanal” mining. Small-scale informal miners dig up about 15% of Congo’s cobalt. That is more than the entire output of Russia, the world’s second-largest producer (see chart). Artisanal miners are critical to global supply. They hand-dig higher-grade ores than those produced by large mechanised mines and can act as swing producers. Yet Congo’s small miners face immense obsta→ Also in this section
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40 Israel’s new leader
40 Cairo’s confiscated houseboats
41 Reviving the Middle East’s railways
cles, which prevent them from reaping the rewards of the clean-energy revolution. Chief among these problems is that small mines are dangerous and polluting. International ngos have reported on horrendous incidents of miners being killed when tunnels collapse and of children as young as seven digging for cobalt. After a report in 2016 by Amnesty International on the human cost of artisanal mines, a number of large mobile-phone and car companies pledged to eliminate artisanal cobalt from the batteries they used and to improve safety in small mines. Six years on, too little has changed. Part of the reason why the lot of smallscale miners has not improved is because of the way they are pushed to the margins of the industry. In 2019 the army evicted 5,000-8,000 miners from the Tenke Fungurume Mine, which is owned by China Molybdenum. Still, people returned to the mine, roughly 100km from Kolwezi, even in the face of violence. “Security is chasing us, beating us,” says Generose Yandaya, who washes rocks to support her orphaned grandchildren. “I want them to go to school. The problem is there is no money and mining is the only job.” Roughly 140,000-200,000 people in the copper belt work as artisanal miners. Most earn less than $10 per day, according to Germany’s Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources (bgr). That is
