Western Consumer Demand Fuels Resource Wars in Poor Nations

Consumer demand in Western industrialized countries for sophisticated electronic equipment and luxury goods earned at least US$12 billion last year for rebels groups, rapacious governments, and warlords in resource-rich developing nations around the world, according to a new report released by the Worldwatch Institute in Washington, D.C. Thursday.

The 91-page report, 'The Anatomy of Resource Wars,' found that local conflicts over control of diamonds, tropical hardwoods, and other minerals like coltan, which is used in the production of cell phones and other electronic equipment, have killed or uprooted more than 20 million people, most of them in Africa, over the past decade.

"From Colombia to Angola to Afghanistan, people are dying every day because consumer societies import and use materials irrespective of where they originate," according the author, Michael Renner.

"If you purchase a cell phone, you may very well be paying to keep the war going in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where rival armies fight for control over deposits of coltan, a commodity that just over a decade ago had little commercial value, but is now vital for the one billion plus cell phones in use today."
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A copy of this report is available from the Sustainable Africa web site at this page (it's a pdf file.) Or you can download it directly from this link.

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