Forget console wars: this is real, serious, deadly war. A story from Yahoo crossed our desk. It’s about how a metal that’s used in consumer electronics, most prominently the PS2 and PS3 has resulted in a blood feud in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, extending the bloody fighting that had previously been about diamonds.
Hit the jump for more on this and feel free to scorn Sony as much as you like.
The metal in question is called Coltan and is widely used in many electronic devices such as cellphones and games consoles in a processed form called tantalum. Coltan is found extensively in African countries, with the Congo specifically being very rich in the mineral.
The huge demand for coltan has resulted in Western mining companies, under contract from larger corporations requiring the metal, plundering mines throughout the country to obtain huge supplies. Even militia groups have joined in, using prisoners-of-war and even children to access the rich supplies of Coltan in the mines.
Sony, desperately needing Tantalum for the production of PS2 consoles at launch, bought up huge supplies of Coltan from the Congo, driving the price of the mineral up by over $200 per pound. Since discovering that the Congo minerals may have been obtained using what were essentially sweatshop workers they’ve sworn off of, using Congolese Coltan.
Still, the morality of the company has to be taken into account in this sort of situation. Whether or not there was any sort of situation going on when it comes to obtaining production materials, a company should have some sort of moral responsibility to check up on where it’s getting stuff from. If not, some questions need to be asked about how ‘caring’ and ’sharing’ these companies really are behind their public-friendly images.
It can’t be denied that in this time of Greenpeace, Amnesty International and Al Gore that the world’s a very worried place to be at the moment. Morality seems to be peaking up inside everybody at the moment and they consider themselves a feminist, an activist, a freedom fighter, a spokesperson for their cause of choice. Sony could be under fire from these sorts of people unless they genuinely work on their corporate responsibility as they have claimed to have done so. Hit up page two for more.
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who gave YOU a desk?
I don’t even have a DESK!
Something funny’s going on here.
Hey!
Number one, Lono stuck that in there…
Numero deux, it said OUR desk..we can share it!
thank god he-who-shall-not-be-named from Florida ain’t still around to call video games “sponsors of terrorism” or whatever. its absolutely absurd that Sony wouldn’t think to figure out how to avoid this kind of crap. this is one situation where they should’ve looked the gift horse in the mouth and scrutinized every detail of their material suppliers. god knows they won’t let something like this happen in the future…
I read that article and it said that many consumer electronics used that material in thier construction. I’m almost 99% sure that they used the PS2 as a cultural scapegoat of sorts to raise hits for the site. What is more likely for you to click on
“PS2 causes blood war”
or
“Demand for Coltan causes war”
cmon.
Perhaps we, as consumers, deserve some of the blame as well. After all, we are the ones that demand the cell phones, DVD players, videogame systems, computers, etc.
Placing blame solely on Sony is sheer ignorance. They deserve some blame, but certainly not all of it.
I postd this in the forums, so I thuoght I would out it up here too:
Well, actually the Dem Rep Congo only holds about 1% of the world supply of coltan. While I see no doubt that there is a link between consumer electronics and the war in DRC and its neighbours in that era I think that equal contributors are firms like Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, and even Nvidia (oh and the collective Brit/American mining corps that have basically been stealing from africa for nearly a century now).
The product was widley sought after already, and a swing in the market was caused by Sony announcing that it needed absolutley crap-loads of the stuff, I think that the only entity that can really be blamed would be greed.
No one is happy about what happened, and I dont think that all these journalists wondering around looking for a scoop is really helping anything. I think slapping the face of Sony, or any large company, on the war really degrades the whole era, and is an insult to the people who died in the horrible attrocities and human rights violation. It was in no way a mere war for money, but for freedom from opression.
If anyone wants to read the “damning article” its published here. “http://www.towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/1352/1″ They key snip-bits include
“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”
Satoshi Fukuoka – of Sony
“The material suppliers source their original material from multiple mines in various countries. It is therefore hard for us to know what the supply chain mix is,” he said. “I am happy to state to you that to the best of our knowledge, (SONY) is not using the material about which you have expressed concern.”
“Extensive evidence shows that during the war hundreds of millions of dollars worth of coltan was stolen from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The UN and several NGOs claim some of the most active thieves were the Rwandan military, several militias supported by the Rwandan government, and also a number of western-based mining companies, metal brokers, and metal processors that had allegedly partnered with these Rwandan factions.”
“…RAID, which is funded by the Queen Elizabeth House, remains determined to convince several of the world’s most powerful governments to investigate the UN’s allegations. Stealing natural resources amidst the chaos of a war violates guidelines set-forth by the Organization for Economic Co-operation, which administers these ethical standards endorsed by over 30 nations, says RAID. The International Criminal Court has also started its own investigation, and RAID is calling on all named governments to cooperate with the court.”
Sorry, I forgot to mention that I did enjoy the article.
Love the site, lotsa laughs, and I love that the sarcasm is occasionally extended to make real statements about social and moral issues as they pertain to gaming.
That being said — criticising an organization for not thoroughly checking to see that there are no negative impacts, while at the same time the post displays banner ads for DeBeers (the biggest perpetrator of the original blood diamond atrocities, not the Chicago fans from the SNL sketch) is a tad sketchy.
That’s like preaching from a soapbox made of human skulls — which is cool as hell, but ultimately loses you the moral high ground.
BTW, did I date myself with the SNL reference?
Am i correct in saying that Nvidia have a “fab-less” system whereby another company produces the actual chips? Looks like theyve got it sorted.
@walkyourpath: We don’t pick out every last advertisement specifically for the site…
DeBeers were advertising here? Thats some poor marketing. I didnt think we were really the target audience.
@Yamster : I get that, and I get ya’ll don’t have the resources to check what pops-up in your banners every time. Just to be clear, I dug the op-ed, homie.
But when you make a call for people to go the extra mile to ensure that they aren’t damaging others — while that extra mile was left off in terms of allowing that ad to accompany your commentary, can you see that it might undermine your position a smidge?
I know it wasn’t intentional, but funny and sad nonetheless. At any rate, interesting topic, man. Looking forward to reading more!
I thought this was a joke till I saw the link.