by NINA MEHRLI
A child mining gold in the Congo (Grassroots Group)
ZURICH – Let me just say up front that I separate my household garbage. I bring the empty bottles to the glass collection point – okay, maybe sometimes a little grudgingly – and I recycle paper, plastic, cardboard and batteries. Lately, I’ve been making a concerted attempt to use public transportation. When I buy cosmetics I make sure the label says No Animal Testing. Ever since a friend of mine told me about the illegal and brutal fishing of tuna, I’ve crossed that fish off my personal menu. I buy only seasonal fruit and vegetables. I’m the first to agree that I could be doing more for the environment, but all in all, I think my efforts for the earth and my fellow humans are pretty respectable.
Or I did think that – until this morning when I took a test on the SLAVERY FOOTPRINT website. Slavery Footprint is a non-profit organization that for years has been working to stamp out modern slavery. And I will tell you that the result delivered quite a smack to my self-image as a good person. Because what the test reveals is how many slaves have to work – without our being aware of it – for us to have the goods we take for granted in everyday life.
Things like our smart phone, music system, iPod, laptop, but also clothes, sports equipment, shower products — not to mention food. The 11-question test is simple, but the result is shattering. It turns out that my lifestyle keeps 56 slaves busy. And after Christmas shopping it might be even more.
27 million slaves in the world
After the first shock, questions about the validity of the test started to kick in. How could a result like that even be possible? Isn’t somebody looking into all this? Surely awareness levels and a sense of responsibility on the part of producers has risen in recent years, or failing that at least a desire not to hit the headlines as an exploiter of children, a driver of slaves? You’d think they’d be more into fair trade now than they were before.
But the problem, according to Slavery Footprint, doesn’t lie so much with the factories making the end product like my smart phone; it goes back to the people providing the needed primary resources. Take coltan. You need coltan to get tantalum – the metal used for many of our gadgets like digital cameras, game consoles, laptops, flat screens and mobile phones. These were all objects that I listed as being part of my household when I took the test.
Every year, 383 tons of coltan are mined in the Congo. Work conditions in the mines are considered to be inhumane in the extreme, and children are among the workers. High profits and lack of government controls during the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo led to chaotic mining practices over which any sort of control is virtually impossible: forced labor is the normal order of the day.
Since the abolition of serfdom and human trafficking more than 150 years ago, slavery is against the law in all countries on earth. And yet, according to the UK’s Anti Slavery International (ASI) there are still some 27 million people living in slavery – mainly in Third World countries like Sudan, Pakistan, and India, but also Brazil, where people are living at the mercy of landowners, earning virtually nothing.
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