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

"Finalist"

"We don’t have many written accounts that are so extensive about the situation with artisanal mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It’s commendable that someone ventured into this territory with a journalistic lens. This book sheds light on the perils and detrimental impacts of artisanal mining. It also underscores how, for many locals, such mining is a lifeline, putting food on the table and their children in school. It presents a balanced view of the situation. The book also offers thoughtful insights into potential ways to alleviate some of the challenges. While it doesn’t claim to provide a complete solution, it suggests measures to enhance mining conditions and advocates for increased oversight to reduce hazards. The DRC ranks disappointingly low on Transparency International’s corruption index, standing at 166 out of 180 countries in 2022. These are systemic challenges. They encompass the entirety of the fiscal infrastructure, including tax collection, gathering of mining royalties, and the distribution of that money both nationwide and in the mining-centric regions. At its core, this is an issue tied to political governance and prevailing norms. Do politicians see themselves as servants of the people or do they see themselves as power brokers who just want to enrich themselves and use power to their own advantage? These are questions that go beyond just the realms of mining and batteries. I don’t have any solutions to propose but they do need to be addressed."

"Yes. I’ve been reading it on an iPad and it does make you put down your iPad and think, ‘What is in this thing that I am reading from?’ It’s about cobalt, a vital raw material and one that probably could have made it into Ed Conway’s Material World as a seventh critical material. It’s vital, particularly for rechargeable batteries, and therefore hugely in demand. Siddharth Kara goes, literally, deep into the holes being dug, mainly in the Democratic Republic of Congo, by artisan miners who are pulling rocks from the ground in the most extraordinary circumstances. Kara interviews the workers and the traders who are buying it and, he alleges, putting it into the formal supply chain. There’s a shocking moment where he just throws in that none of them has ever held a mobile phone. And yet, they’re at the very end of the chain that leads to our iPhones and our electric cars. It is a shocking account, and he sets it in the context of the terrible history of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo – previously Zaire, and before that the Belgian Congo – as a place that has been exploited, from the word go, for these minerals, which could have made its people wealthy and prosperous and well looked after. It’s a shocking indictment and his underlying polemical point is that there are big companies who are whitewashing this out of the record, who are claiming to have a clean supply chain. His essential contention is there is no such thing as clean cobalt. Yes, and his point is that at the top end – the bottom end, ethically speaking – of the DRC, there are people making out like bandits. There are literal bandits in this book, and there are also politicians who are creaming off an extraordinary amount of money. The other interesting point that comes out in the book is the involvement of China. These artisan miners are almost exclusively selling their product to Chinese traders. And so, clearly, the Chinese and China, as a state, are deeply embedded in this supply chain. He recounts appalling racist comments from one of the traders, talking about the unwillingness of the Congolese to work hard and organise themselves. This Chinese gentleman suggests that only the Chinese can organise them to make money. But all the money is going somewhere else. It’s pretty shocking."