According to the U.N. report, most coltan mining in the Congo is done by peasants because the war has forced the once legitimate Congolese mining companies out of business. These novice miners sift for coltan in riverbeds or dig it out of abandoned mines. The rebel groups also are believed to mine coltan directly, using laborers (sometimes prisoners) to extract the ore, then smuggle it out of the country.
Many coltan miners are children. Some estimates suggest that 30 percent of schoolchildren in the northeastern Congo have abandoned their studies to dig for coltan. While the promise of striking the mother lode may be tempting, most miners make a pittance. Fraud is rife, and collectors often cheat the miners out of their profits. "Mining coltan is in itself a terrible job," one miner told a researcher from the Pole Institute, a Goma, Congo-based nongovernmental organization, earlier this year. "But there is also the problem of armed bandits who steal our goods, as well as the danger of landslides and collapsing mines."
Nevertheless, the prospect of making a few dollars a day - big money in a poor country with an economy in shambles - remains irresistible to many people.
Once the ore is extracted, it is collected by local traders - many of whom are suspected of being rebels - who pay between $5 and $10 a pound for the unprocessed coltan. The local traders then sell the coltan to larger regional traders, often located in neighboring Rwanda and Uganda. This is the most difficult part of the chain to trace, because five or six intermediaries can be involved before it reaches the larger regional traders, according to Judy Wickens, secretary general of the Tantalum-Niobium International Study Center, or TIC, based in Brussels, Belgium. Sometimes coltan convoys run by one rebel group are hijacked by enemy rebels, only to be resold to other traders.
At this point, the black-market coltan enters the global market. According to the United Nations, more than 20 international mineral trading companies import minerals from the Congo via Rwanda alone.
These imports, as well as others from Uganda and Burundi, end up in Asia, Europe and the United States. Sabena Airlines, Belgium's national carrier, regularly flies minerals out of the Congo, Uganda and Rwanda. American Airlines, in partnership with Sabena, also transports goods originating in the region throughout the United States. (Sabena says it transports coltan only from legitimate traders.) Tantalum is extracted from the ore by processing companies such as H.C. Starck, which produces 50 percent of the world's tantalum powder, and Cabot (CBT), the second-largest mineral processing company. These firms - which buy from international trading companies and also directly from large mines and local trading concerns - in turn sell refined tantalum powder to capacitor manufacturers - the largest of which are AVX (AVX), Epcos, Hitachi (HIT), Kemet, NEC (NIPNY) and Vishay. Their products go to the cream of the high-tech industry. Alcatel (ALA), Compaq, Dell, Ericsson, Hewlett-Packard (HWP), IBM, Lucent, Motorola (MOT), Nokia and Solectron (SLR) are all major buyers of tantalum capacitors. Chip firms such as AMD and Intel are also increasingly buying tantalum powder in its raw form to use in manufacturing semiconductors.
CHAIN REACTION
So far, high-tech companies have been reluctant to acknowledge they may be using materials originating from Congo rebels. That said, they can do little to prove they do not. "We first heard about this in April and immediately asked our suppliers if they used tantalum from the Congo," said Outi Mikkonen, communications manager for environmental affairs at Nokia. "All you can do is ask, and if they say no, we believe it."
And so it continues down the line. Tantalum capacitor makers place their faith in their suppliers. One of Nokia's main suppliers, for example, is Kemet of Greenville, S.C., the world's largest tantalum capacitor maker. "We have gone back to our suppliers to ascertain that the material we are buying is not obtained illegally from the Congo," says Harris Crowley Jr., a senior VP.
