Voice from Europe

By Alyn Smith MEP

Alyn Smith is one of Scotland’s six Members of the European Parliament. He is a member of the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee and Scotland’s representative on the Agriculture Committee

Conflict Minerals

LIKE many people living in our interconnected world, I’ve often felt powerless in the face of powerful interests and highly complex systems that seem to be so intricate that we will never reform them for the better. But I’ve never changed my mind over the moral obligation we have to improve the lives of the world’s most desperate and vulnerable people.

That’s why I believe conflict minerals need to be eradicated from the global supply chain, comprehensively and immediately. Conflict minerals are a little-understood facet to procurement and it is positive that the world is waking up to the fact that we may be complicit in modern-day slavery.

Like conflict diamonds, conflict minerals are sourced through opaque or illegal practices in unstable areas of the world. In areas such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold are sourced in conditions of extreme exploitation, violence and slavery.