DRC: Lobby Group Enlists Support of Electronic Companies to End Conflict

By a Staff Writer

To achieve this objective, Enough has engaged with industry-wide efforts, specifically the work of the Electronics Industry Citizenship Coalition/Global e-Sustainability Initiative (EICC-GeSI).

In a new report--- Getting to Conflict-Free: Assessing Corporate Action on Conflict Minerals—Enough says that without sustained leadership from individual companies, industry-wide efforts can also lead to a lowest common denominator response incommensurate to the scale and urgency of the issue. Individual actions by companies have a critical role in buttressing industry efforts through supply chain tracing, contractual obligations, and supporting certification.

Minerals extracted from eastern Congo—the ores that produce tin, tantalum, tungsten (3Ts), and gold—are essential to the electronics devices used every day. Tin is used as solder on circuit boards in every electronic device; tantalum stores electricity and is essential to portable electronics and high-speed processing devices; tungsten enables cell phone vibration alerts; and gold is not only made into jewelry, but is also used in the wiring of electronic devices.

The report focuses on the efforts within the industry to address the conflict minerals issue and also assesses the response of other industries that are reliant on the 3Ts and gold. These rankings are an effort to provide consumers with the information they need to purchase responsibly, as well as a means of encouraging companies to continue to move forward in good faith.

Eastern Congo has been the hotbed of violent conflict for more than a decade and a half, causing more death than any war since World War II. Although Congo’s conflict stems from long-standing grievances, the trade in conflict minerals provides the primary fuel for the conflict. The conflict minerals trade--worth hundreds of millions of dollars per year-- provides incentives for rebel groups, militias, and criminal networks within the Congolese army to control strategic mines and trading routes through patterns of violent extraction and deeply exploitative behaviour.

Against this background, two years ago the Enough Project initiated engagement with major electronics companies on conflict minerals, writing to 21 consumer electronics industry leaders to call their attention to this issue and inquire about the steps they were taking to ensure their products were conflict-free. According to the report, a group of six electronics companies are leading industry efforts to address conflict minerals. Two-thirds of the companies included in the rankings are taking limited action on this issue, with the bottom third effectively nonresponsive. The 21 companies used in this ranking are leaders in terms of profit and market share, and they set the tone and direction of wider industry efforts.

“As electronics companies reap record profits, it is important that they work with urgency and focus to implement internationally agreed upon standards for supply chain due diligence in order to demonstrate to consumers that their products are verifiably conflict-free”, says the report.

Intel, Motorola, and HP have emerged as leaders, visiting suppliers and chairing industry-wide efforts to audit one of the conflict minerals: tantalum.

Additionally, six companies stood out for having investigated their supply chains in detail, some to the point of fully identifying their minerals smelters. The smelters represent the crucial chokepoint in the supply chain, where minerals are processed into metals, and are therefore key to ethical sourcing. These six companies were HP, Microsoft, Apple, Nokia, Acer, and Intel. Several of these companies visited their smelters in far-off locations such as western China. AMD, Dell, and HP also helped lead a multi-stakeholder effort with NGOs to ensure that the U.S. conflict minerals legislation will be implemented effectively, following lobbying by Motorola and RIM that helped get the bill passed.

“ Our objective was to have companies at the top of the minerals supply chain use their buying power to influence their suppliers, exerting pressure down the supply chain, a model of change that has had success in the apparel, forestry, and diamond sectors. Since then, we have seen dramatic changes, including the passage of conflict minerals legislation in the United States, and an evolving multilateral architecture for supply chain due diligence from the United Nations and OECD’, says the report. “We have also seen a host of efforts initiated by companies, governments, and NGOs, both in Congo and internationally, to trace supply chains back to their sources, independently audit chains-of-custody, and conceptualize certification schemes similar to the Kimberley Process for conflict diamonds.”

The report says that despite this progress, the violent extraction of mineral resources continues to stoke conflict on the ground in eastern Congo, and consumers still have no way of knowing whether the products they purchase are indirectly financing the violence.