Dependency, Forced Displacement, and Child Slavery: The Dark Side of Green Tech

Abuses in Africa have attracted criticism from some influential quarters, including Amnesty International and Pope Francis.

As US President Joe Biden touts his administration’s climate agenda, some observers are drawing attention to the consequences of the global drive towards green energy.

“Biden’s renewable energy crusade exploits and enslaves thousands in poor nations,” says Jason Isaac, the founder and CEO of the American Energy Institute. “The human suffering caused by mining for electric vehicle batteries and wind turbine construction is unimaginable — as is the environmental destruction caused by these mines and their toxic byproducts.”

As the head of a group funded by US-based petroleum producers, Isaac has ample incentive to critique the burgeoning green energy industry. But he isn’t the only one questioning the response to the climate crisis.

Sputnik breaks down some of the criticisms of the push for green tech and considers how they can be addressed.

Global Working Conditions

“The sustainable development goals set a target for the elimination of child labor of 2025,” says Ben Smith, a senior technical officer focused on child labor at the International Labor Organization. “We are far from achieving it.”

A key issue is the mining of cobalt, an important component of many rechargeable batteries. The metal is mined throughout the African continent, especially in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and the working conditions of those extracting it often attract harsh criticism.

“Cobalt is a critical component in rechargeable car batteries, and the European Union’s 2030 climate target will only increase demand for this metal,” says Czech politician Tomáš Zdechovský.

“Despite the [European] commission’s zero‑tolerance approach to child labor in trade agreements, it is estimated, according to reports by UN agencies, that in the southern Katanga province, more than 40,000 children are working in hazardous conditions in cobalt mines with inadequate safety equipment and for very little money.”

Reports indicate children sometimes labor for $5 per day working long hours in dangerous tunnels where they’re often exposed to cancer-causing chemicals. The conditions have been called “modern-day child slavery.”

“Labor in cobalt mining is a serious violation of children’s rights that puts the health and safety, and even the lives of many children, at risk,” says Smith. “This vicious cycle of poverty and child labor must be broken for the sake of the children exposed to this harsh reality and for the social and economic progress of countries like the DRC.”

Professor Chukwuemezie Raphael Eze of Nnamdi Azikiwe University in Nigeria says the low wages serve another important purpose for Western companies beyond merely the cheap acquisition of raw materials. Low pay and poor conditions drive Africans to migrate to the United States and Europe where they can also be utilized for cheap labor.

Eze claims the economic consequences “destabilize Africa's political economy” while Western collaboration with local milities drives a divide-and-conquer policy that undermines internal unity.

Forced Out

Transnational mining giants are eager to cash in on the global trend towards renewable energy, and human rights group Amnesty International notes they don’t always play fair.

“The people living in the region should be benefiting from the growth in mining,” said the organization in a report focusing on the DRC’s southern province of Lualaba. “Instead, many are being forced out of their homes and farmland to make way for the expansion of large-scale industrial mining projects.”

The report claimed that industrial giants often remove people from their land “with little concern for the rights of affected communities and little heed for national laws meant to curtail forced evictions in the mining sector.”

In the villages of Samukonga and Tshamundenda, hundreds lost access to nearby farmland. Farmers told Amnesty International they were sometimes forced to accept insufficient compensation for their land while being intimidated by the presence of military officials. Some received no compensation at all.

Military personnel sometimes used “unlawful force” while evicting residents, or destroyed farmers’ crops without notice, according to the report.

“One evictee claimed that she was sexually assaulted by military forces while attempting to retrieve crops,” the report claimed.

When residents were compensated with new housing, it was often cheaply-built and lacked running water, electricity, and sewage connections.

“The forced evictions taking place as companies seek to expand industrial-scale copper and cobalt mining projects are wrecking lives and must stop now,” said Agnes Callamard, the secretary general of Amnesty International.

Dependency Syndrome

Experts say mining transnationals’ conduct in Africa perpetuates a cycle wherein the continent serves to provide cheap raw materials for the West rather than developing economically, a phenomenon called dependency syndrome.

“The Western preaching of human rights and democracy promotion in relation to Africa is of double standard and national interest-oriented as despotic African leaders that cooperate with Western parasitic economic interests are protected,” says Eze. “Anti-imperialistic and nationalistic leaders are always either directly or indirectly eliminated, visited with excruciating sanctions, or arbitrary sent to International Criminal Court.

Economic interests have long been recognized to be a major driver of the West’s foreign policy, as when Belgium backed the assassination of pan-Africanist leader Patrice Lumumba. French interests are said to be behind the killing of African revolutionary Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso, and research has shown the involvement of US-trained military officers in a dozen coups throughout the continent.

The combined effects of political and economic interference mean that the historical pattern of Western exploitation of Africa continues, a relationship that Ghanian politician Kwame Nkrumah termed “neocolonialism.”

“The angle of human rights abuse has, over the past few decades, been referred to by academics as the ‘Resource Curse’,” says researcher Ashraf Patel, “a thesis that says if a nation has valuable resources that the global economy needs (i.e. oil, minerals, coal, copper) than it is bound to be cursed with conflict.”

Patel noted a similar pattern throughout the 1990s when cell phones first saw widespread adoption. At that time lithium was the hot commodity. Today it’s joined by copper and cobalt.

“In a sense African development is frozen and trapped in this 'Back to The Future’ dystopia,” says Patel.

A Way Out?

At an event earlier this year in DRC capital Kinshasa, Pope Francis spoke with uncharacteristic bluntness regarding the economic forces that stifle Africa’s development.

“Hands off Africa,” he declared. “Stop choking Africa. It is not a mine to be stripped or a terrain to be plundered.”

After decades of exploitation, many Africans feel the same. And while Western leaders claim companies based in China and elsewhere merely seek to duplicate the same patterns of dependency and “debt trap diplomacy,” several African leaders have found solidarity with fellow nations in the Global South.

“The most promising new multilateral institution-forum is BRICS Plus, which is offering a more equitable deal for the Developing South and for Africa,” says Patel. “Institutions such as the New Development Bank and alternative currencies, as well as technology support can go a long way to meet the real development and industrial needs.”

Patel called BRICS the “anchor of the Global South” and praised its potential to reconfigure global power relations. While US-backed institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have required countries receiving loans to pursue neoliberal “structural adjustment” policies that open the doors to Western multinationals, China-backed development programs are largely agnostic over the policy pursued by other nations.

Africa “refutes the view that a new colonialism is taking hold in Africa as our detractors would have us believe,” said South African president Cyril Ramaphosa at a recent forum on China-Africa cooperation.

Rather than viewing China as a predatory force, many African nations instead see the Asian power as an inspirational example of a formerly poor country able to dramatically improve its economic position. Some leaders are even pursuing greater ideological cooperation with Chinese leaders.

Professor Eze advocates the rise of “courageous political leadership” across the continent and the strengthening of ties “with the less exploitative and less dehumanizing world powers like Russia and China.”

The academic claims the two countries offer “checks and balances” on the world stage, challenging a global paradigm where “might makes right and justice is the advantage of the stronger.”