Blood Coltan: Have a Coltan-free Holiday

The conclusion of 2014 marks a decade and a half of explosion in gadgets. Many firsts, like iPods, consumer GPS devices and the Wii, helped to spark the revolution that has forever transformed our world. Now each holiday season finds us discovering and fiddling with new laptops, smart phones, game consoles, and more, that aim to make our lives more convenient and entertaining.

However, technological advancement has come with a dark-side. A key element in creating the electronic devices we love is a mineral called coltan. Short for Columbite-tantalite, coltan is a black tar-like mineral, that when refined forms a heat resistant powder that can hold a high electrical charge. This property makes coltan vital for manufacturing tantalum capacitors found in a vast array of electronic devices, particularly mobile phones, laptops, tablets and many other modern gadgets and electronics.

A vast majority (80%) of the world's coltan is found in the mineral-rich country in the heart of Africa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). One would have hopes that the technological revolution and the world's subsequent reliance on coltan would help spark a natural development process within the DRC that would catapult the nation's economy and people out of poverty. In reality, the DRC has remained volatile and unstable. In the east of the country, where coltan is mined, worrying levels of death, rape and displacement continues. In fact, during the span of the last fifteen years, up to 6 million people have died, and many are capitalizing on the anarchy in order to plunder the DRC's natural resources.

Additionally, as different armed groups fight to gain control of the mines, it's become evident that there are financial links between the never-ending war and trading of DRC's coltan and other natural resources. The exploitation chain runs deep and involves rebel groups and forces from neighboring countries (Rwanda and Uganda), transnational corporations who purchase, distribute and process the conflict-mined coltan, and the manufactures who use the refined capacitors in a wide range of electronic devices.

Ultimately however, we are all responsible as consumers. The clear dilemma for us consumers however, is; How do we know exactly what we are buying? Or in this case, what conflicts may our hard-earned money be unintentionally funding? In efforts to pressure the big brands and producers of electronics to use fair trade and implement transparent mechanisms that provide evidence that they are not directly or indirectly exploiting or fueling conflict zones, consider having a coltan-free holiday season this year!

(Note: Blood coltan is not exclusive to DRC and central Africa. Coltan reserves also exist in the Amazon jungle and the region bordering Venezuela, Columbia and Brazil has also become a conflict zone.)

Take the pledge!

Here are just a few popular items that use coltan:
Mobile phones
Laptops
Tablets
GPS devices
Digital cameras
Video cameras
Video game consoles (Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo)
Drones and other military technologies
and the list goes on!

Links and resources:
AllAfrica.com: Congo-Kinshasa: Blood Coltan - Remote-Controlled Warfare...
Blood Coltan
Blood In The Mobile
Breaking The Silence: Coltan Facts
UN Coltan Primer
Fairphone

Post-Green Agriculture

Growing up in South Eastern Virginia, my family always maintained a large, roughly 1-acre sized garden in our backyard. But as a youngster, there were few things my sister and I enjoyed less than spending summer afternoons sitting in our garage-turned basement "picking beans". Our chore was to pull the tips off of string beans and snap them in half so they were ready for my Mom, who would boil them and pack them in the freezer. We equally disliked picking butter beans, which meant we had to squeeze their pods to pop them open and pick out the beans inside. It didn't take long for my sister and I to develop a system. We would divide up the buckets of beans between us and then try to be as mechanical as possible, reaching in one bucket, picking the beans and then tossing them into a pot. The entire time, making sure to minimize any wasted movements that would prevent us from finishing the task as fast as possible.

It wasn't until I moved off campus my third year in college, that I recall having my first conception of appreciation for those fresh grown vegetables I took for granted as a youth. In fact, it was quite a rude awakening, going to the grocery store with my roommate and realizing I had to buy my greens in a can. I never even knew that was an option!

At that moment, I became cognizant of the line in food culture. The line separating food we either grow ourselves or buy directly from local people who raise, grow or make it from the food that comes from farm factories, hundreds or thousands of petroleum-fueled miles away.

There was a time here in the US, prior to the mid-20th century, that agriculture was generally smaller in scale and used largely organic based methods. However, the surplus of chemical agents, ammonium nitrate (used in explosives) and various defoliants (i.e. - Agent Orange), created by chemical manufacturers between WWII and the conflict in Vietnam, became the pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers used in the Green Revolution.

It was the era of the Green Revolution and development of hybrid corn which ushered a marriage between high-yielding crop varieties and management practices designed to meet these new varieties' high demands for nutrients and pest protection. This resulted in a replacement of internal ecological controls with external inputs like chemical fertilizers and synthetic pesticides, which in essence, divorced agriculture from ecology. While these developments resulted in an increase of yields, we now recognize that farmers' dependence on these technologies have been problematic from an environmental and human health standpoint. Nitrogen (N) and toxic chemicals from pesticides and other external controls leak from these agricultural systems and can accumulate in soil, water, food and people.

With a world population expected to reach 9 billion by 2050, coupled with economic growth fueling higher per capita consumption, the challenge for sustainable agriculture becomes clear. How do we meet the food and nutrition needs of a growing population, without sacrificing the environmental integrity of local landscapes and the global environment?

Presently, some 13 million ha of land is converted annually to agricultural use, mainly from forests and woodlands, which unfortunately weakens an important part of our ecosystem that helps to mitigate the effects of climate change. In turn, climate change adds pressure on agriculture systems and exacerbates degradation and desertification of increasingly over-exploited lands. So there is tremendous need for sustainable land management and productive agriculture that promotes biodiversity and environmental integrity rather than degrading it.

The FAO has determined in their report, The State of Food and Agriculture 2014, that family farms (similar to that of my youth) are key to ensuring environmental sustainability and global food security. With most family farms ranging from small to medium in size, they are well positioned to uphold global natural resource management and environmental sustainability because they can utilize their labour more intensively and better manage their resources. As a result, small farms tend to have higher agricultural crop yields per hectare than larger farms.

Additionally, the sustainable increase in production from family farms will not only help strengthen household level food security and nutrition, but also improve rural livelihoods and incomes. Subsequently, helping to fight both hunger and poverty. However, the single biggest challenge they face is climate change. Thus, supporting rural communities and farmers in vulnerable areas build resilience and adaptive capacity to climate change will help to ensure global food security and poverty reduction.

It's now become clear that agriculture, climate change, land degradation, loss of biodiversity, soil fertility, hunger and poverty are all interlinked. Models of sustainable agriculture, like climate-smart agriculture and organic farming are necessary to help build resilience to climate change and increase agricultural productivity that takes care of and protects the natural environment. Agricultural systems must be managed as ecosystems that seek to not only build the vitality and strength of our communities, but also build life in the soil, avoiding the use of toxic chemicals, and seek to reduce agriculture's environmental footprint. The future will depend on how effectively we understand and manage the socio-economic and ecological elements of agricultural ecosystems.

Don't Burst Google's Bubble

Despite receiving recent criticism from the development community, including philanthropist Bill Gates, don't burst Google's bubble just yet.

While Gates acknowledges that connectivity for schools and health facilities "are good things", he also argues that Google's Project Loon is not necessarily a good idea for "the really low-income countries, unless you directly say we're going to do something about malaria".

I get the criticism that development projects should lend focus to ensuring basic needs are met for those suffering the most, and that likewise, digital inclusion is probably not the top priority for families directly affected by preventable diseases.

However, taking a wider gaze, global trade is being replicated in e-infrastructure, and preexisting relationships of power are being embedded in new technologies of communication. The fear is that the global inequality gap could potentially widen, as nations who lack e-readiness cannot fully participate in the global economic cycle, and as consequence, are left reliant on foreign aid to bridge the gap. This condition complicates Gates insinuation that improvements to health solely, will precede economic growth for the world's poorest societies.

Intentional efforts must be made to develop e-readiness and e-infrastructure. If broadband and technological diffusion is achieved in poorer societies, these tools have the potential of catalyzing economic development that's sustainable. The World Bank defines "smart development" as "the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to tackle the most pressing development problems such as poverty, access to basic services, and job creation".

The Internet provides multiple opportunities for socioeconomic development (and democratic development), thus Project Loon's promise of spreading access to broadband, in terms of availability and affordability, is crucial. In fact, any technological breakthrough that can facilitate digital inclusion more rapidly and via less expensive devices should be embraced.

As an added benefit, Google's Loon balloon technology is solar powered and uses wind to navigate, so it's environmentally sustainable as well. The only question is whether the balloons will out perform and replace costly satellite solutions such as VSAT.

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