SPECIAL REPORT
China in Africa: Young Workers, Deadly Mines

Children in Congo risk their lives digging cobalt and copper ore with their bare hands for Chinese companies.

By Simon Clark, Michael Smith and Franz Wild
Bloomberg Markets, September 2008

Adon Kalenga works seven days a week collecting minerals from the ground with his bare hands.

He is 13 years old and lives in Katanga province in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He has no home and can't afford the $6 a month it costs to attend public school in this central African country of 62 million. Sometimes he sleeps in the streets; other nights he spends in an orphanage.

Mostly, he works, earning about $3 per day. He's one of 67,000 people in Katanga who earn a living collecting stones infused with two minerals that are in demand worldwide: copper and cobalt. Reddish-brown copper is used to make the electrical wires needed to light the world's cities. Cobalt, a silver-gray metal, is used to make jet engines, ink and mobile phone batteries.

Katanga, a region of green rolling hills that's bigger than California, is home to 5.5 million people. The province in the south of Congo contains 4 percent of the world's copper and a third of its cobalt reserves, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

The minerals Adon and children like him wrest from the red, hard earth find their way to smoky smelters on the edge of impoverished towns near the mines. Most of these rusting, hand-fed furnaces are owned by companies based in a faraway country, one that was founded on an ideology that exalts the rights of workers: the People's Republic of China.

``My life is hard,'' says Adon, wearing black rubber boots, a hooded sweatshirt and ripped jeans that sag on his skinny frame.

`I Don't Know Why'

Adon's left shin is scarred from a fall during a mine landslide three years ago that killed workers, including four young friends. He spends the day around unstable, hand-dug mineshafts, using his bare hands to fill sacks with ore.

He then hauls the rocks down a steep trail. At the end of the path, he works knee-deep in a stream, the kind that has spread a cholera epidemic throughout much of Katanga. The boy's hands are raw from washing rocks in a metal screen.

``The Chinese buy the ore,'' Adon says. ``I don't know why.''

Adon toils alongside about 200 other boys and men and a handful of women in the Kamatanda mine, a 1-square-mile (2.5- square-kilometer) area pockmarked by holes as deep as 80 feet (25 meters).

On paper, the mine, 3 miles (5 kilometers) northeast of the town of Likasi, is owned by Congo's state mining company, Lubumbashi-based La Generale des Carrieres et des Mines, or Gecamines.

Chaotic Capitalism

In reality, Adon and his peers practice a chaotic form of capitalism, with little supervision from either the company or the state. The hand diggers aren't employees; they're freelancers who sell what they've dug and cleaned to brokers such as Patrick Nsumba.

The middleman pays Adon to wash the copper ore, which the man sells to a smelter in Lubumbashi, Katanga's capital. The plant is run by a unit of Tongxiang, China-based Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt Co., which processes Katangan copper and cobalt. With wads of Congolese francs on hand, Zhejiang Huayou's representatives buy ore from people like 29-year-old Nsumba.

``This is one of the worst forms of child labor,'' says Joost Kooijmans, a legal officer at the Geneva-based International Labor Organization, a United Nations agency. ``If they're buying ore processed by children, they're involved in violating the rights of the children.''

Chinese smelters buy cobalt and copper from mines across Katanga that use child labor, says Patricia Feeney, who campaigns for the rights of Congo's miners.

`No Regard for Health'

``The Chinese smelters have no regard for the health and safety of their workers or the children who dig the ore,'' says Feeney, executive director of Oxford, England-based Rights and Accountability in Development.

In Tongxiang, the Chinese city 80 miles from Shanghai where Zhejiang Huayou is based, marketing manager Zhai Yang says his company sells processed cobalt via intermediaries he declines to name to companies such as Sony Corp., the second-largest consumer electronics company; Nokia Oyj, the world's largest cell phone maker; and Samsung Electronics Co., the second-largest mobile phone maker.

George Boyd, a spokesman for Tokyo-based Sony, declined to comment. Susan Allsopp, of Espoo, Finland-based Nokia, says the company is researching whether Zhejiang Huayou is an indirect supplier.

``We have no evidence to suggest that they are supplying any of our suppliers,'' she says. ``We take any accusations of this nature seriously and do not accept the use of child labor or abuses of human rights. We will continue to monitor this matter, and if we find any breaches of our standards, we will take swift action.''

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