ECONOMY: Warring Over Natural Resources Kills 20 Million – Report

By Stephen Leahy Reprint | | Print |

Stephen Leahy

BROOKLIN, Canada, Oct 24 2002 (IPS) - The world’s insatiable demand for cellular telephones and other consumer luxuries is fuelling violent conflict and killing millions in developing countries, reports a new study from the Worldwatch Institute.

Brutal wars are being fought not only over diamonds but for control of other valuable natural resources like coltan, a mineral that keeps cell phones and other electronic equipment working, tropical woods, and other rare materials.

Those conflicts have killed or displaced more than 20 million people and raise at least 12 billion U.S. dollars a year for rebels, warlords, repressive governments, and other predatory groups around the world, says the study, ‘The Anatomy of Resource Wars’, by the Washington, D.C.-based research organisation.

Resource wealth provides the incentive and the money to spark and sustain conflicts, says Michael Renner author of the report. In addition to the human toll, many resource-related conflicts are being fought in or near areas of great environmental value, accelerating deforestation and decimating populations of gorillas, elephants, and other wildlife.

”The goods we buy have a history and an impact on the real world,” says Rennger.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo rival armies fight for control over deposits of coltan, a commodity that just over a decade ago had little commercial value. ”The enormous expansion in global trade, coupled with lax or corrupt customs officials, has made access to key markets relatively easy for warring groups,” the report says.

Troops from Uganda, Rwanda Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia, and Chad became involved in the conflict, with many plundering the Congo’s rich mineral wealth in diamonds, gold, coltan, niobium, cassiterite, copper, cobalt, zinc, and manganese, Renner found.

Rwandan and Ugandan forces use child labour to mine gold and diamonds. Other occupying troops and their rebel allies have forced coffee growers and palm oil producers to sell their commodities to them at depressed prices. International companies have also paid military and rebel leaders to obtain concessions to exploit Congo’s resources.

The report documents similar situations in Cambodia, where rebel forces and the government have conducted illegal logging worth 400 million dollars a year. In Columbia, rebel control of the cocaine trade nets those groups 40 million dollars yearly, while in Afghanistan both the Taliban and Northern Alliance once collected millions from opium and heroin.

”Companies and rich nations that benefit from cheap raw materials have long turned a blind eye to the destruction at their source, and most consumers don’t know that a number of common purchases bear the invisible imprint of violence,” Renner says.

Many companies did not care where they bought their diamonds until non-governmental groups documented the multi-billion dollar trade in ‘conflict diamonds’ in Angola, Sierra Leone, the Congo, Liberia and elsewhere.

That publicity resulted in the Kimberley Process, a certification scheme for the export and import of rough diamonds designed to cut off sources of rebel funding in affected African countries. The international South African-led initiative is scheduled to be in place before the end of this year.

Canada recently agreed to participate and is enacting laws to make it illegal to import rough diamonds from sources that do not participate in the Kimberley Process.

”This will help reduce violent conflicts and prevent their recurrence," said Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham. ”The certification scheme should serve to promote economic development and increase tax revenues in those nations as legitimate mining ventures increase,” he added.

”It’s a good first step,” says Susan Isaac of Partnership Africa Canada (PAC), a coalition of Canadian and African NGOs working on conflict issues and sustainable development.

”A third party monitoring system to randomly audit the effectiveness of the process in participating countries is still needed,” she adds.

More assistance to help some African countries build their customs and policing capacity to shut down the trade in conflict diamonds is also needed, says Isaac. Some countries, like Guinea and Sierra Leone, have already received assistance and are now profiting from the legitimate diamond trade.

Northern countries have not paid attention to the fact they are indirectly funding some of these conflicts, she says. ”We need increased awareness of where things come from.”

Renner cites the rapidly growing public interest in Shade Grown Coffee or Fair Trade goods as proof that people in the North do want to know more about what they buy.

He thinks other commodities should have strong certification schemes like one used by the Forest Stewardship Council for timber. It is the only system that globally tracks products from the forest floor all the way to the retail shelf, a process known as "chain of custody" monitoring.

The Worldwatch report also recommends the development of corporate codes of conduct in resource extraction industries and support for NGO campaigns that ”name and shame” companies into doing business in more responsible ways.

It also wants increased corporate transparency and accountability, for instance, by requiring companies to disclose all taxes, fees, royalties, and other payments they make to host governments, as a condition for being listed on leading stock exchanges and financial markets.

ECONOMY: Warring Over Natural Resources Kills 20 Million – Report

By Stephen Leahy Reprint | | Print |

Stephen Leahy

BROOKLIN, Canada, Oct 24 2002 (IPS) - The world’s insatiable demand for cellular telephones and other consumer luxuries is fuelling violent conflict and killing millions in developing countries, reports a new study from the Worldwatch Institute.
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