A Call to Arms - demand for Coltan causes problems in Congo - Industry Trend or Event

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So far, high-tech companies have been reluctant to acknowledge they may be using materials originating from Congo rebels. That said, they can do little to prove they do not. "We first heard about this in April and immediately asked our suppliers if they used tantalum from the Congo," said Outi Mikkonen, communications manager for environmental affairs at Nokia. "All you can do is ask, and if they say no, we believe it."

And so it continues down the line. Tantalum capacitor makers place their faith in their suppliers. One of Nokia's main suppliers, for example, is Kemet of Greenville, S.C., the world's largest tantalum capacitor maker. "We have gone back to our suppliers to ascertain that the material we are buying is not obtained illegally from the Congo," says Harris Crowley Jr., a senior VP.

But tantalum suppliers can offer little assurance to capacitor manufacturers that their product doesn't come courtesy of the Congo rebels. "I'm not in favor of killing gorillas," says Dick Rosen, CEO of AVX, a tantalum capacitor maker in Myrtle Beach, S.C. But "we don't have an idea where [the metal] comes from. There's no way to tell. I don't know how to control it," he says.

Epcos, a tantalum capacitor manufacturer in Munich supplying the mobile phone industry, is also quick to place the responsibility on its suppliers -- which include Cabot and H.C. Starck, as well as smaller processors in Europe and Japan. Heinz Kahlert, a spokesman for Epcos, pointed to a press release issued by H.C. Starck that states "we only purchase raw materials from established trading companies that have worked in various African countries for a long time and are headquartered in Europe or the United States." The press release goes on to claim: "These trading companies have confirmed that H.C. Starck is not being supplied with material from the crisis areas of central Africa"

At some point though, the wall of plausible deniability starts to break down. While H.C. Starck is adamant it is not being supplied with black-market coltan, one of its own suppliers, U.K.-based trading company A&M Minerals and Metals, is less sure. A&M works mostly with Nigerian and Bolivian miners, but also buys up to 3 tons of tantalum-bearing ore a month from Uganda. "I couldn't tell you for 100 percent that this material [from Uganda] didn't come from the Congo," says managing director James McCombie. "It could have been smuggled across the border."

The company works with peasant producers and local traders, and McCombie admits that "once you get to that level, it is very difficult to check the provenance. It would be silly of us to try to pretend that we know the origin of every pound of [coltan] we get in our hands."

Then there's Brussels-based Sogem, another international trading company that sells the unrefined coltan it buys in the Congo and Rwanda to processing companies in the United States, Europe and Asia. It offers only a vague reassurance about the origins of the ore it resells. "We have been told that our money goes directly to the population," says Sogem spokeswoman Monick Delvou. Sogem doesn't deal with rebel-backed traders and monopolies in the region, Delvou says. But she declines to name the mines and local trading companies that supply Sogem and admits she isn't 100 percent sure of the original source. "How can you be 100 percent sure of anything in life?" she asks.