Conflict Minerals

https://www.thestar.com/

Tech giants, jewellers believe their continued efforts to make “conflict-free” products will be undermined without the law. Apple doesn’t want to see it scrapped. Neither does Intel or Tiffany & Co.

But the U.S. conflict-minerals law — which requires American public companies to avoid using minerals that fund war and human rights abuses in the Congo region — is widely seen today as facing its most serious threat since its passage in 2010.

The White House is considering a suspension of the law, part of U.S. President Donald Trump’s pledge to cut government regulations and a long-held goal of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. If that does not happen, congressional Republicans are expected to try defunding it, which they attempted last year. At the same time, federal regulators recently announced that they plan to “reconsider” the law’s scope. The acting head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the agency that oversees the regulation, called it “a misguided rule.”

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http://allafrica.com/

Rwanda is counting on US President Donald Trump coming good on his intention to suspend a law that bars companies from handling conflict minerals to save the country more than $4 million spent annually on compliance.

President Trump had throughout his campaign threatened to do away with the law, known as the Dodd Frank Act, which he argued restricted the growth of manufacturing in the US. The Dodd Frank Act was signed into law by his predecessor Barack Obama in 2010. The legislation was intended to safeguard stability in mineral-rich conflict- prone countries like those in the Great Lakes region, by ensuring that natural resources were not used to fund conflicts.

Last week, a leaked memorandum from the White House showed that President Trump had drafted an executive order suspending the Dodd Frank Act for two years.

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http://www.reuters.com/

A possible plan by U.S. President Donald Trump to suspend a rule on “conflict minerals” could help fund armed groups and contribute to a surge in unrest in central Africa, regional states said on Wednesday.

Sources told Reuters last week that Trump planned to issue a directive targeting a Dodd-Frank rule that requires companies to disclose whether their products contain minerals from war-torn parts of Africa, including Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

A leaked draft seen by Reuters calls for the rule to be suspended for two years. Competition for Congo’s vast mineral resources has fueled two decades of conflict in its eastern provinces, including a 1998-2003 regional war that killed millions, most from hunger and disease.

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http://www.bizcommunity.com/

An Al Jazeera documentary that tells the tale of how advocacy groups got it wrong by pushing through a law on conflict minerals – which has virtually brought the legitimate trade in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to its knees – is up for an Emmy Award.

Despite being home to $24trn worth of untapped mineral reserves, the DRC remains one of the least developed countries in the world. Conflicted: The Fight over Congo’s Minerals investigates the impact of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act’s Section 1502, added in 2010, which requires publicly traded companies to track whether their products contain so-called conflict minerals from the DRC.

As part of Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines series, journalist, Anjali Kamat, travels to the eastern hills of the country, where tantalum, tungsten and tin are mined by hand before making their way into electronic devices across the world.

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http://qz.com/

In recent years Western advocacy groups have achieved unprecedented success in mobilizing Europeans and North Americans behind a “conflict minerals” campaign to help end the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

They have also attracted strong criticism, both internationally and in the DRC, for the perceived negative impact of their work. Over the past three years I have been working on a documentary, “We Will Win Peace”, which is part of this critique. As one local activist told us during the making of the film, “The advocacy led by these organizations, we [didn’t] understood the goal, as Congolese… If we had been informed before of their intentions, we could have done something.”

Similarly, speaking to a group of small-scale rural cultivators, one said, “We didn’t understand what was happening or why such a decision had been made… No one explained to us what was going on.”

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

Seven years ago, Carolyn Duran realized the company she worked for had blood on its hands.

Intel — the world’s largest semiconductor maker, where Duran led sustainability efforts — was building many of its products with minerals and metals extracted from mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Gold, tantalum, tin and tungsten, all crucial components in many electronics, fund an on-again-off-again civil war marked by rape and brutal violence.

But getting these conflict minerals out of Intel’s supply chain was not as simple as prohibiting purchases from militant-controlled mines.

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http://america.aljazeera.com/

Minerals from countries where sales fund corruption and violence continue to enter the US, as oversight proves tricky

Efforts by the United States to reduce the devastating violence in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo by regulating the trade in conflict minerals — a group of four minerals, mined in Congo and neighboring countries, where they help to finance conflict there — are proving difficult to enforce as illegal armed groups and corrupt members of the national military continue to create instability in the region, according to a report released this summer by the Government Accountability Office.

“We do see these armed groups are still present and they are most likely still benefiting from the mineral trade,” Evie Francq, a DRC researcher with Amnesty International, told Al Jazeera America by phone from Nairobi.

“What we see is there are still very big displacements of the population, people that are fleeing abuses by rebel groups,” said Francq, adding that civilians have also become caught up in army operations against those groups, like the Democratic Force for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR).

“Often civilians are targeted either by the armed group or by the [Congolese] army because they’re suspected of giving information about the group to the army, or about different groups that are fighting against each other,” she said.

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http://www.nytimes.com/

A pink My Little Pony balloon does not usually evoke images of rifle-toting warlords in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Still, Party City Holdings, the decorations and costumes retailer, recently disclosed a possible link to securities regulators, helping to put it near the bottom of a list ranking companies on their compliance with laws against using minerals mined in war-torn regions across Africa.

Party City is just one of 1,262 companies that filed the required disclosures on their use of so-called conflict minerals. Ninety percent of those companies, including Microsoft, Apple, General Electric and Ford Motor, said they also might be using tainted supplies. Yet Party City landed near the bottom of a list compiled by Tulane University researchers that ranked the companies’ compliance records in this area, while giants like Microsoft achieved perfect scores.

“Anybody with a relative interest in ethical sourcing would be interested in this list,” said Matthew Whitteker, the marketing director for Assent Compliance, a software and services firm in Ottawa that commissioned the Tulane study. “For any company that manages this well, both Wall Street and Main Street will look at their brand favorably.”

The Tulane study is just one example of a growing business opportunity for consultants, auditors, lawyers and software firms looking to cash in on a complex provision in the Dodd-Frank financial reform law that requires companies to disclose their use of conflict minerals “necessary to the functionality or production” of products they make or contract out for manufacturing.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

Finally, some good news for brutal militias.

WASHINGTON — Warlords in the Democratic Republic of Congo got some help from two conservative judges on Tuesday, when a federal appeals court for the District of Columbia ruled against part of a key regulation on conflict minerals.

But they also got an unlikely assist from Securities and Exchange Commission Chairwoman Mary Jo White, whose very agency was defending the rule before the court.

Armed militias in eastern Congo have long relied on the mining of tantalum, tin, tungsten and gold to finance more than a decade of violence, much of it targeting civilians. But militia access to mining wealth was dramatically curbed in 2012, when the SEC adopted a new regulation requiring U.S. companies to audit their supply chains for conflict minerals. The agency also required corporations to disclose the findings of those audits to consumers in simple language that explains whether their products are “DRC conflict free.”

Congress directed the SEC to write the rule as part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law.

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http://www.theregister.co.uk/

Dodd-Frank stupidity writ large

Worstall on Wednesday I have muttered around here more than a few times about the various idiocies of the Blood in the Mobile campaign. This was the idea that we could stop the appalling (and true) levels of violence in Eastern Congo’s mining trade by making American companies fill out lots of documents.

The idea was that if they all had to say whether they used conflict minerals, they’d all prefer to be able to say “no” and therefore there wouldn’t be the violence over the minerals trade that happens today.

We were told that this would cost some $10m originally, one cent on the price of each mobile phone. By the time the legislature got at it, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said it would cost $4bn in the first year alone.

I rather railed against this, insisting that there was a much easier, cheaper and simpler system available; one that the industry itself was already implementing.

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