Pacific Views

Conflict Cellphones, Blood Plastic

I was watching Bill Maher talking to an audience about conflict diamonds from Africa, and the implication was that Africa is a mess because women just don't care where jewelry comes from. Well, Bill, the problem is a little bigger than that and it won't be solved even if every last woman in America decides to skip out on the DeBeers sponsored brainwashing. Even if conflict diamonds, or blood diamonds if you want to be lurid, stopped being mined tomorrow, it wouldn't be over.

And we can start with coltan. A mineral sometimes mined in the war torn Democratic Republic of Congo:

...A new report from the International Rescue Committee, a New York-based aid agency, said as many as 3.3 million Congolese have died since 1998. That would make the conflict, at once fueled and underwritten by the plunder of coltan, diamonds, timber and gold, the deadliest since World War II, according to the group. ...

Where's the call to stop the use of cellphones for humanitarian reasons? Or what about gold, a material used not only for ornament and monetary value, but for numerous industrial processes. It isn't without its problems:

...Though Barrick struck out in Indonesia and the Congo, the big payoff came from the other side of the continent. The company’s president bragged to shareholders that the prestige of the Mulroney-Bush advisory board was instrumental in obtaining one of the biggest goldfields in East Africa at Bulyanhulu, Tanzania. Barrick, according to its president, had hungered for that concession—holding an estimated $3 billion in bullion—since the mid-1990s, when it first developed its contacts with managers at Sutton Resources, another Canadian company, which held digging rights from the government. (See footnote 1.) Enriched by the Nevada venture, Barrick could, and eventually would, buy up Sutton. But in 1996, there was a problem with any takeover of Sutton: Tens of thousands of small-time prospectors, “jewelry miners,” so called because of their minuscule finds, already lived and worked on the land. These poor African diggers held legal claim stakes to their tiny mine shafts on the property. If they stayed, the concession was worthless.

In August 1996, Sutton’s bulldozers, backed by military police firing weapons, rolled across the goldfield, smashing down worker housing, crushing their mining equipment and filling in their pits. Several thousand miners and their families were chased off the property. But not all of them. About fifty miners were still in their mine shafts, buried alive. ...

It doesn't stop there. What about the gas in our cars:

...Africa already supplies between 15 percent and 18 percent of the oil the U.S. imports, according to Gus Selassie, a senior analyst with the World Market Research Center in London. That is projected to increase to 25 percent by 2015, he said. ...

While Nigeria, the country most discussed in the previously quoted article, has begun to reform, their oil industry has a bloody history which is by no means over:

Shell: Ken Saro-Wiwa was a determined thorn in the side of Nigeria's military government. He led a campaign against the exploitation and pollution of his native Ogoniland by the government and by the Shell Oil company.

...On Friday, Nov. 10th, 1995, Saro-Wiwa and eight other minority rights campaigners were hanged in a prison surrounded by tanks and heavily-armed soldiers. His last words were: "Lord take my soul. The struggle continues."...

Chevron: ...Chevron, which produces about 400,000 barrels of oil a day in Nigeria, has been involved in previous killings. On May 28, 120 protesters occupied Chevron's Parabe oil platform, about 14 kilometres off the Atlantic coast. The young Ijaw were incensed that Chevron had cut a channel through a creek that supplied drinking water, contaminating it with sea water.

The company called in the feared paramilitary Mobile Police, known as “kill-and-go” to locals. They stormed the platform in three Chevron helicopters. Eyewitness Bola Oyinbo told the November 19 San Francisco Chronicle: “They started shooting commando-style at us even before they landed. They shot everywhere. Arulika and Jolly fell. They died instantly.” ...

Of course, if we wanted to be exceptionally picky, the byproducts of petrochemical refinement are in thousands of products. Did the plastic water bottle, the dyes in your clothes, the lip balm, or the casing of the electronic equipment you used today contain materials from African petroleum? Who knows. Maybe a more important question is, will it be more likely in the future:

...These offshore wells did indicate that there were viable reservoir facies, seals, and oil and gas prone source rocks. The Liberian offshore can be considered underexplored with limited data from seismic, gravity and magnetic surveys and seven wells over an area of more than 50,000 square kilometres. ...

And there's more. Much more:

..."Sub-Saharan Africa," the authors of Short Changed: Africa and World Trade (Brown and Tiffen 1992) note, "exports gold and diamonds, but also large quantities of copper, bauxite, iron ore, uranium, phosphate rock and manganese; smaller quantities of asbestos, beryllium, cadmium, chromite, cobalt, germanium, lead, lithium, nickel, platinum, tantalite, tin, tungsten, vanadium, and zinc" (p. 66). ...

The point of this very limited foray into the vast mineral exports of the African continent isn't to call for multiple boycotts. It's to say that unless you know for certain that every single item you possess is made from materials mined in a western country by workers who weren't digging under the business end of an AK-47, you probably own something whose origin would make you queasy. You will probably buy something the next time you go shopping that came from places and practices that it isn't nice to think about.

And we don't. Think about it, that is. Because it's too much information, and it would take years to start tracking these things down. Even worse, it would probably be futile to try.

Just as futile as it would be to boycott everything that might possibly come from a conflict region. Just as futile as it is to pick out one high-profile 'flagship' import and make a lot of noise about it. It won't work for the same reasons that sanctions didn't take down Hussein, and haven't taken down Castro or Kim Jong Il.

I'm definitely a member of the ranks of people who don't know what the solutions are, or where to begin. This is a systemic problem that won't be solved by anything less than a global rethinking of priorities, a reevaluation of rabid consumerism, and a higher set of standards for corporate behavior on all fronts.