Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

by Siddharth Kara

artisanal miners I interviewed described cooperatives as the central agents of their exploitation. Perhaps some cooperatives operated as these three officials described, but from everything I had learned, CMKK, COMIKU, and COMIAKOL seemed to serve little function other than to enrich their powerful owners while allowing everyone up the chain to claim that the cobalt from their operations was produced without child labor or hazardous working conditions. I pushed the officials on the issue of child labor, and as expected, they assured me that there were no children working at the sites they managed, which did not match with my investigations. They also asserted that most people working at artisanal mining ZEAs were registered with mining cooperatives, which again did not match with my investigations. On the contrary, I had