[rubbingalcohol]

You literally want to place the blame solely on a third world country for the deaths and disease of all these child laborers when it's our first world addiction to their resources driving the injustice in the first place? Who is in a better economic standing to improve this situation?

Would you have no problem buying ivory, since it's the poacher who acted immorally, and you as the end consumer have no responsibility as to how it was supplied?

I don't throw this word around lightly, but what we are enabling in the Congo is evil, and all so we can drive expensive electric cars and pretend like we're making the world better. It's pathetic.

[vorpalhex]

The thing with Ivory is that it was the traders, not the producers, making the money. You can ruin trader profitability by not trading with them. You can't convince Congo to stop using a child labor force with no protections by making them more broke - they'll just retask the labor force into different labor. We've seen this with diamonds.

[pnako]

How is "addiction" to their resources driving injustices? I live in Australia, where we export plenty of minerals (including cobalt, incidentally). We don't have children working (and dying) in mines, AFAIK.

So clearly it's not an issue of cobalt, it's a problem within the Congo.

[zaroth]

[Edited]