So you have people with no alternative, no other source of income, no livelihood. Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced because their villages were just bulldozed over to make place for large mining concessions. Imagine an entire population of people who cannot survive without scrounging in hazardous conditions for a dollar or two a day. On why these conditions are on par with slavery And so that's not legal, but it's happening. Well, you put them in a tight pit, cram them with 10,000 other people and pay them a couple of dollars, and they'll produce thousands of tons of cobalt per year for almost no wages. I mean, imagine you're in a part of the world where there are millions of people who barely get a dollar or two a day who are grindingly poor and will accept almost any labor arrangement just to survive. And the reason is, it's a penny-wage way to boost production. In some cases, predominantly artisanal mining is taking place. And yet, lo and behold, at most of the industrial mines, there is some artisanal mining taking place. Technically, under the law, there should not be artisanal mining taking place in any industrial mine. Interview Highlights On how 'artisanal' cobalt mines continue to operate in the DRC - despite being illegal The DRC produced approximately 74% of the world's cobalt in 2021. Some 20,000 people work at Shabara artisanal mine in the DRC, in shifts of 5,000 at a time. They use pickaxes, shovels, stretches of rebar to hack and scrounge at the earth in trenches and pits and tunnels to gather cobalt and feed it up the formal supply chain.' 'People are working in subhuman, grinding, degrading conditions. 'You have to imagine walking around some of these mining areas and dialing back our clock centuries,' Kara says. In his new book, Cobalt Red, Kara writes that much of the DRC's cobalt is being extracted by so-called 'artisanal' miners - freelance workers who do extremely dangerous labor for the equivalent of just a few dollars a day. He says that although the DRC has more cobalt reserves than the rest of the planet combined, there's no such thing as a 'clean' supply chain of cobalt from the country. Chan School of Public Health and at the Kennedy School, has been researching modern-day slavery, human trafficking and child labor for two decades. Smartphones, computers and electric vehicles may be emblems of the modern world, but, says Siddharth Kara, their rechargeable batteries are frequently powered by cobalt mined by workers laboring in slave-like conditions in the Democratic Republic of Congo. An artisanal miner carries a sack of ore at the Shabara artisanal mine near Kolwezi, DRC, on Oct.

Cons of child labor in cobalt mines