Wealth and Human Rights in a Capitalist World Part Two: What Climate Activists Can Learn

If you have not read part one of this series, please go and do so now. In it, we explore the history of Belgian colonialism in the Congo, and it serves as a necessary precursor to part two.

Not all of the blame for the Congo’s woes can be pinned squarely on colonialism from Belgium and neocolonialism from the United States, but quite a large proportion can. However, what is commonly missing from the conversation surrounding the Congo’s history, as quiet as those whispers already are, is an extrapolation of the murderous phenomenon observed at the turn of the 20th century to a broader economic principle that may have implications outside of the Congo itself.

What I am referring to is the completely rational and predictable, even if immoral, reaction of King Leopold and his concession companies to the rubber boom of the 1890s. The demand for the commodity increased, its price shot up, and its producers scrambled to boost production so as to take full advantage of the temporary opportunity to enrich themselves. Should anybody be surprised that human rights got shoved aside in the process?

The all-important question now is: could it happen again? If we are talking about the death of 10 million people, it is probably not impossible, but seems unlikely. If we are talking about the grotesque abuse and even killing of workers in the pursuit of short-term profit, then we need look no further than the exploitation of labor all across the world from China to Indonesia to Qatar. My fear is that as some industries boom, such exploitation will rapidly intensify, perhaps to such an extent that the next Joseph Conrad will write a book about it.

Leopold’s enterprise was a capitalist one, by definition. The Congo was owned privately by him, not publically by the Belgian state. And he, along with the other shareholders of the concession companies, was chasing profit above all else. Today, the same fundamental structure exists in the global economy, even including, in many cases, the same enslavement. There are currently 25 million people in forced labor worldwide, and that number excludes child slaves and sexually-exploited women. Add onto this the unshackling of global capitalism since the 1980s by neoliberal institutions like the IMF, World Bank and WTO, the gradual weakening of the liberal international order and the rise of states that don’t even pretend to care about universal human rights such as Russia and China, and it appears as if we might be moving towards 1890, not 2050.

Can’t we just blame Leopold for what happened in the Congo? Why should that ugly period of history be placed on the economic system’s shoulders?

I suppose it is possible that Leopold was an exceptionally evil individual, but to say that his unique personality is responsible for the brutality of his imperialism would be inconsistent with certain historical facts. A person making such an objection would have to explain why, for example, Leopold’s colonial neighbors were just as, if not more, brutal.

Forced labor systems for extracting rubber were also established in the French territories west and north of the Congo River, in Angola under Portuguese rule and in Cameroon under German rule. Under the French, the violence was no different, from the hostage-taking to the village-burning to the chicotte-lashing. In the French territories where rubber was prevalent, the percentage of population loss was equal to that in the Congo, 50%. The only reason Leopold earned so much more notoriety for his crimes was that most of the rubber forest happened to be within his territory.

If one looks to the German colonization of what is now Namibia, the picture is even darker. The Hereros, a southwest African ethnic group, got fed up with the Germans continually pushing them off of their land, so in 1904, they attacked white-owned farms, killing 123 settlers and traders but sparing women, children, non-German whites and missionaries. The Germans retaliated with explicit, unabashed genocide. “I believe that this nation as a nation must be exterminated,” said General Lothar von Trotha. “I prefer for the nation to disappear entirely rather than allow them to infect our troops with their diseases.”

The military began slaughtering the population indiscriminately. Men, women and children, armed or not, were shot, bayoneted or clubbed to death. The rest were chased into the desert, where they died of thirst because the Germans poisoned the water holes. By the end of the massacre, 65,000 Hereros had been killed, or 80% of the population.

All of this suggests that the events in the Congo during the rubber boom were not merely a symptom of one monarch’s abhorrent psychology, but rather a feature of the broader economic system. Does this necessarily entail that private capital should be abolished? Of course not. But it does mean that there needs to be rigid safeguards in place to protect the most vulnerable, such as workers in Africa, Asia or Latin America, from wild vicissitudes in the market like the price of rubber suddenly skyrocketing.

Where the next booming industry might arise is nearly impossible to predict; the next John Dunlop could be around any corner. If I knew, I would be investing all of my savings in it, not writing this article. However, there is one industry which seems a rather obvious area of concern: batteries.

Before we continue, I must stress that the threat posed by climate change is enormous and unequivocal. Nothing presented here should be used to bolster the opposition towards swift and bold policy proposals. The question is not if we should act, but how, and any person who concludes from this material that we should not act is misusing my work.

That being said, the belated rush to decrease greenhouse gas emmissions has produced a worldwide panic which, although justified, may sideline human rights just as it was done in the Congo. The demand for renewable energy has already grown dramatically, and it will only continue to do so, possibly at faster rates if more governments jump on board the international initiative to overhaul our energy sectors. The US 2020 elections are particularly important in this regard, with its economy being the largest in the world and its current president having done everything within his power to stop any solution to climate change.

In 2018, the global electric car fleet exceeded 5.1 million, up 2 million from the previous year and almost doubling the number of new electric car registrations. By 2030, the International Energy Agency estimates the number of electric vehicles on the road will reach 125 million. Because they don’t use gasoline, such cars rely upon lithium-ion batteries to function. Those batteries are also used in smart phones, tablets and other consumer electronics, but their increasing demand is principally driven by the spike in electric car production.

The global lithium-ion battery market was valued at $37 billion in 2018 and is expected to rise to $92 billion by 2024. One of the key components in the battery, which also happens to be the most expensive, is cobalt. Naturally, the silvery blue metal has to come from somewhere. And as if by some cruel, unfortunate design of the universe, half of the world’s cobalt reserves are located in one country, the Congo.

As the saying goes, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. Just as gas cars drove up the demand for rubber more than 100 years ago, electric cars are driving up the demand for cobalt right now, and the victims are exactly the same people as before. Hundreds of thousands of Congolese are employed in mines with minimal oversight and no safety measures, primarily in the south of the country. They dig hundreds of feet underground and are frequently injured or killed by collapsing tunnels, landslides, fires and toxic fume inhalation.

About 80% of cobalt production in the Congo is part of organized industrial operations carried out by large mining companies, which commonly push people off their land to make way for drilling. The other 20% comes from 100-150,000 “artisanal miners,” groups of individuals who dig their own tunnels in search of cobalt and other minerals. Sometimes, they trespass on corporate land, which can result in deadly skirmishes with guards. The conditions in their mines are even more dangerous since they typically aren’t built with any structural supports, and the people venturing into them are often as young as seven.

According to UNICEF, there are 40,000 child laborers working in the mines, and that estimation was made in 2012. How much it has risen in the proceeding years is unknown. The kids work up to 12 hours for one or two dollars per day, and they are especially vulnerable to severe health effects. “It was a living hell,” said Yanick Kalumbu Tshiwengu, a former child miner. “As children we were exploited and worked in very dangerous situations. We saw things that no child should see. There was a culture of rape and violence. Girls often fell victim to rape, which as children we were powerless to prevent. Sometimes lives were lost for a few francs.”

So what happens after the destitute Congolese worker emerges from the depths of the earth’s crust, coughing, with a sack full of cobalt ore? The mineral has to be funneled through a supply chain that is unsurprisingly dominated by Chinese firms. From the beginning, eight of the 14 largest mining companies in the Congo are Chinese-owned, and they subsequently sell the raw cobalt to other companies to be refined into chemicals, powders or metals. These firms too are predominantly Chinese. At present, over 80% of cobalt chemical production occurs in China.

The refined cobalt is then sold to manufacturers of finished goods, notably lithium-ion batteries, which are used to make electric cars. Once again, China dominates this step in the process as well, having produced more electric vehicles than every other country in the world combined in 2017. In 2018, the production volume of electric vehicles in China reached 1.29 million units, an astounding increase of 60% from the prior year.

The typical electric car contains 10-20 pounds of cobalt, and China gets about 90% of the mineral from the Congo. This raises serious concerns about the condition of labor should the demand for green energy continue to rise, as it most certainly will. Granted, some of the producers in China are transnational corporations with headquarters in the United States or Europe; and there is an extraordinary amount of international scrutiny on governments and businesses today which did not exist to nearly the same degree in 1890, so a massacre on the scale of King Leopold’s colony is unlikely. But some exploitation and abuse is nothing short of a certainty if policy makers don’t act soon before the battery boom hits its peak.

“Finding effective solutions to the climate crisis is an absolute imperative, and electric cars have an important role to play in this,” said Kumi Naidoo, Amnesty International’s Secretary General. “But without radical changes, the batteries which power green vehicles will continue to be tainted by human rights abuses.”

To be clear, the ethical cracks in the foundation of the renewable energy industry are no reason to oppose policy solutions to climate change. It is a crisis, and should be treated as such. Nevertheless, an optimal approach to transforming our energy infrastructure should include regulation, oversight and the promotion of technologies that use lower proportions of cobalt. Many other measures, such as creating more corporate transparency (no legislation currently exists anywhere to require companies to publically report on their cobalt supply chains.) and strengthening the Congo’s political institutions could make a huge difference.

Any information in this article derived from no clear source was taken from King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa by Adam Hochschild.