Last month Amnesty International highlighted the shocking conditions faced by creuseurs, miners in the turbulent southern Congo, many of them children. Scores died appalling deaths in 2015, buried alive in the underground darkness.
The region provides half of the world’s cobalt, the lustrous rare metal essential to the lithium-ion batteries which power smartphones. Huayou Cobalt, a Chinese company and the principal local buyer, processes the cobalt that eventually finds its way, via shadowy international trading networks, into many of the devices we buy on the high street. Amnesty’s report was a brief illumination of the under-reported world of rare metals, which is the subject of this fascinating and important book.
David Abraham, a former Wall Street and White House commodities strategist, asserts that we