African Playstation War

"Toward Freedom", a site dedicated to advancing human rights, released an investigative report on how Sony could have added fuel to a 10-year conflict in Africa's Democratic Republic of Congo. Sony's huge manufacturing needs required a rare metal called coltan. Coltan becomes a bluish-gray powder called tantalum after it has been refined. Tantalum can withstand extreme heat, so manufacturers use it to make electric capacitors. You and I both know that Sony and other manufacturers needed a lot of electric capacitors so the need for tantalum sky rocketed. In 1999, tantalum cost $49 / pound. In 2 years, it shot up to $275 / pound.

Researcher David Barouski commented:

[The] PlayStation 2 launch... was a big part of the huge increase in demand for coltan... SONY and other companies like it, have the benefit of plausible deniability because the coltan ore trades hands so many times from when it is mined to when SONY gets a processed product, that a company often has no idea where the original coltan ore came from, and frankly don’t care to know. But statistical analysis shows it to be nearly inconceivable that SONY made all its PlayStations without using Congolese coltan.

Now how does this tie to the war? This huge demand for coltan by Sony and other personal electronics manufacturers led Rwandan troops and Western companies to exploit the people and mineral resources of Congo, with prisoners-of-war and children often forced to work in mines. The Rwandans were shooting it out for the mines, which contained deposits of cobalt, uranium, gold and, of course, coltan. The estimates of the war’s dead range from hundreds of thousands to several million.

Sony ensures us that they are now taking steps to make sure that they do not use coltan illegally mined from Congo.

Posted in: child labor,coltan,playstation,ps2,sony,tantalum,war