Your work accompanies a piece called "The Price of Precious" and you're talking about conflict minerals in the Congo but we're not just talking about blood diamonds anymore, that's something that a lot of people were familiar with a decade ago, what kind of minerals? MARCUS BLEASDALE: It's minerals that we use in our electronics products so it's tin, tungsten, tantalum, things that make our batteries function more efficiently, things that make our cell phones buzz silently, things that we use for solder to keep these electronic products together and working. MARCUS BLEASDALE: We'll do it the other way around, so in the mine they extract tin, tungsten, tantalum, that product then is exported illegally most of the time from Congo to its neighboring countries, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi. I've been working in Congo since the late 1990s and when I was in these mines in 2003, 2004 there were certainly a lot more children in them than I saw recently, but that's not to say that it's not a problem anymore, it is a massive problem, there are still lots and lots of children working in the mines, being forced to work in these environments by military.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/NewshourWorld/~3/WaQCAujICn4/bleasdale_10-05.html
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