Why does Congo have a near monopoly in Cobalt extraction? Is all the Cobalt in the world really only in Congo? Or is it something else? Congo produces 80% of the global cobalt supply. Why only Congo? Is the entirety of cobalt located ONLY in Congo?
In: Earth Science
Congo has a lot of valuable minerals such as Cobalt and Coltan. These minerals are often sought for their useful properties. Minerals such as Coltan are useful for basically all electronics. Cobalt is used for electronics such as batteries. Some of these are called Blood Minerals because of how much those resources fuel ongoing conflicts. Think of it like how Wakanda sits on a giant supply of Vibranium because that’s basically what ideas of Wakanda were based on.
However, over the past few centuries, the entire world seems to agree to nothing else but finding ways to exploit the African continent for its wealth of resources while screwing over the local population. International powers in addition to local rivalries (sometimes encouraged by international powers) have sparked countless wars, enslavement, genocide, child labour, and other atrocities. Governments and industries there are often goaded into having less-than-safe work conditions for dangerous jobs at far lower wages than most of the developed world, even though those minerals exist elsewhere. This isn’t recent and there’s HUGE histories of Colonization that are also are a factor. In particular, I’d recommend reading what the King Leopold of Belgium did in Congo and asking yourself why we only learned about Hitler as a mass murderer in school and not this monster.
All that history currently results in a very de-regulated mining market in Congo, which sits on a giant mound of valuable blood minerals that fuel wars and death, that international companies and powers can cheaply buy and exploit, especially electronics companies. As a result, they are all too happy to turn a blind eye to the human rights abuses and cruelty they fund for their newest products. We are not necessarily innocent in all this either. Chances are your computer, your phone, and any batteries and electronics you own has minerals in it that are a product of this exploitation. Not much we can do about it now of course, but it’s important to at least realize the history as to WHY these things happen and that it’s still happening; too much history for me to get into entirely on Reddit. Some countries have mines for cobalt and other blood minerals or are considering opening new mines for them, but they actually have standards and regulations, so they’re mostly ignored in favor of the cheap, blood soaked kind.
Tl;dr: Cobalt is available in many other places in the world, just not nearly as cheaply. The reason it’s mainly supplied from Congo is a complex web of historic colonization and exploitation that still persists in different forms.
Source: I learned about this several years ago through my work at a museum while researching Coltan and other metals and had to teach this to school children using Black Panther and Vibranium as a relatable reference.
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