By Halil Ibrahim Medet
ISTANBUL (AA) - Extreme poverty forces families in Congo to send their children to work in hazardous cobalt mines under conditions akin to slavery, posing significant risks to their health and well-being.
Children are often sent to work in the mines due to the extreme poverty in the region and families often struggle to make ends meet, American Journalist Nicolas Niarchos told Anadolu.
“There are slavery-like conditions that exist for some of these children. Some of the worst stories that I've heard are incredibly upsetting and sort of unimaginable,” he said.
Niarchos said some children start to work in the mines at age 3.
“By the age of 6, they're helping sort of carry bags of minerals, and then a little bit later on, they're actually going down into the mine sites themselves,” he said.
“You call it wage slavery because they're just paid incredibly poorly. The conditions are absolutely terrible. The children and the adults that both face the same conditions, it's going down these hot, very deep tunnels, some up to 100 meters (328 feet) deep, some maybe even deeper, which are very unstable,” he said.
“They have very little oxygen and then they go through these tunnels. They chip away at some rock and then they lug these huge sacks out. The rock itself has toxic qualities, and the tunnels that they're going through have not been supported. So, they can collapse into each other very easily and kill whoever is down there.”
He said children who work in the mines receive $1 - $2 despite long working hours and it is impossible to determine how many children are employed as miners.
- Risks faced by children
Niarchos said the risks faced by children include mine collapse, extortion by older children and adults, such as stealing money and sexual abuse.
“And of course, they're not going to school. So that creates a lot of problems for their development and for their right to education,” he said.
“The other long-term problem that you have to look at is that these children are being exposed on a daily basis to toxic heavy metals, which both has development impacts on them and if they have their own children can lead to deformations in their own children,” said Niarchos.
Underlining that mobile phones and electric car batteries are made with cobalt also contributes to the catastrophe, Niarchos noted that 78% of cobalt processing plants are in China and suppliers in some South Asian countries where batteries are produced are not concerned about how the mines are extracted.
Niarchos pointed out that there is a migration toward places where copper and cobalt mines are located due to the increase in poverty in the Congo, increase in the demand for cobalt mines and the expansion of the market.
He believes that “even if you were to stop demanding cobalt today, people would continue to artisanal mine in Congo, because they would be mined for copper, or they would be mined for all these other things.”
Niarchos emphasized that measures can be taken to improve conditions in the mines and minimize the risks, including making artisanal mining safer, regulating mineral trade and creating alternative economic opportunities to reduce poverty-driven mining for cobalt and copper.
* Writing by Seda Sevencan