Comment by seanmcdirmid
5 days ago
There are kids in Congo that are claiming to be older than they are so they can get work in mines to feed themselves and their families. If they don’t work they and their families starve, but if they do work they are encouraging immoral child labor. I don’t understand why many people think the answer is easy and straightforward in that case, this sounds like the trolley problem to me.
The people involved in international aid in particular know fine well that it's not an easy problem to solve... Exploitation and corruption is at every level here. For a children in Congo it may be a better option if the only alternative is to starve, but let's not pretend that everyone from the mine owner to the smartphone buyer is not profiting from that situation.
As a consumer one of the few immediate means of action we have is to at least refuse these products when we can... Then yeah, vote, donate, get involved for these kids to live decently.
Let’s say we boycott the Congo because they allow child labor (or turn a blind eye to it), and they see our “fix” (disallow it, let them starve) as barbaric because they have nowhere near enough resources to just make the starving problem go away (or to consider that as a possible solution). Did we make progress on anything by cutting the Congo off economically? We already know that if the country became richer the problem would probably go away naturally, but making it poorer instead, why?
I kind of understand why China invests in Africa the way it does vs how the west seems to just throw charity and morality at it. Development would solve the problem naturally (a richer society will stop sending their kids to the mines, or having their schools organize them to make fireworks, a sad state of affairs that happened less than two decades ago in China but now is unthinkable).