This Is How You Finance Child Slavery

Here’s one piece of news that you’re not going to enjoy.

If you own a smartphone, a tablet PC, a laptop, an electric car, or just about any other portable consumer electronics device, you’re financing child slavery.

It may sound like I’m twisting facts, making erroneous blanket statements, or straight up lying, but it’s the truth… And sadly, it’s the truth for hundreds of millions, even billions of consumers who are innocently going about their business.

Here’s how it works:

You’ve probably heard of blood diamonds — those precious stones mined in conflict regions encompassing places such as Angola, Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, and a handful of other Third-World nations.

Thanks to the efforts of the international press and the UN, those blood diamonds, named so because of the slave labor employed in their extraction, have largely been regulated out of existence.

But that has not stopped warlords from using similar methods to mine other sought-after commodities.

Slavery… 21st Century Style

One of those main commodities is cobalt.

You may not know much about this metal, but believe me, you depend on it the same way you depend on plastic, aluminum, carbon fiber, and any other materials that go into modern consumer goods.

Cobalt, you see, is a crucial component in just about every lithium-ion battery in existence today… those same batteries that power your iPhone or Samsung Galaxy, your iPad, your laptop, or your Tesla.

Modern lithium-ion batteries require cobalt to give them the long run time that makes them so convenient for modern consumer applications.

But while lithium mining has been going through an unprecedented bull market over the last decade, leading to new mining projects all over the world — including substantial investment in North America — the cobalt sector has seen little to no industry attention.

Just one look at lithium prices over that time period tells the story.

Along that same timeline, cobalt prices have remained flat, even falling at times.

The reasons for this are numerous, but perhaps the biggest cause is also the most shocking.

60% of the world’s cobalt supply comes from the world’s biggest supplier, the Democratic Republic of Congo — an African nation where the current literacy rate barely touches 75% and the life expectancy is less than 50 years.

And because labor laws and practices in Africa remain sketchy at best and downright genocidal at worst, there’s a very good chance that the cobalt powering your personal devices now was extracted from the Earth by the small, emaciated hands of a child.

According to the DRC’s own estimates, 20% of cobalt exported from the country is generated by underage artisanal miners, mostly in the south of the country.

There are between 110,000 and 150,000 artisanal miners at work in the DRC, many as young as seven, who work with their bare hands sorting crushed rock for any traces of cobalt…

These are children whose parents were often either also enslaved or outright killed… children with little to no chance of reaching adulthood, barring a humanitarian miracle.

If you think that’s bad, however, just wait, because it gets worse.

Modern Convenience, Brought to You By the Third World

Right now, world cobalt demand is shooting through the roof, thanks again to the unprecedented bull market for the devices that need it to operate.

That means if there was ever a time when such reprehensible child labor practices were in vogue, now is it.

With every new phone that hits the market, every new electric vehicle that hits the streets, or every new solar or wind farm installed, more cobalt will be needed to keep it going.

Meaning this humanitarian disaster will continue to be fed.

Make no mistake… we will all carry the blame for this, as it happens.

But it doesn’t have to be so.

You see, slavery isn’t the highly profitable trade its practitioners want to believe. I hate to make such an emotionally charged topic seem so cold and mechanical, but it’s a fact: child labor makes no sense, even on a practical level.

Investors to the Rescue

Modern machinery and industrial processes are far more efficient and far more effective on every level of cobalt production.

The biggest and perhaps only obstacle keeping us from halting this practice forever is finding new mining projects in nations where child labor isn’t the problem that it is in the DRC.

And that’s already happening.

Though it’s starting small, cobalt mining in the Western Hemisphere is finally starting to ramp up to meet skyrocketing demand.

A handful of far-sighted companies that have watched the lithium boom of recent years know that a similar boom in cobalt lies ahead, and they are planning for it.

They’re opening new mining projects, doing due diligence, executing geological analyses, and getting set to cash in and grow right alongside the market for one of today’s most important industrial materials.

I recently zeroed in on just such a company — a small one — as it gets set to join the vanguard of the approaching cobalt bull market.

Click here to see my full report and get ahead of the curve before cobalt prices spike.

Fortune favors the bold,

Alex Koyfman

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His flagship service, Microcap Insider, provides market-beating insights into some of the fastest moving, highest profit-potential companies available for public trading on the U.S. and Canadian exchanges. With more than 5 years of track record to back it up, Microcap Insider is the choice for the growth-minded investor. Alex contributes his thoughts and insights regularly to Energy and Capital. To learn more about Alex, click here.