6/13/2012

Conflict gold?

Well Well Well, haven't I been ignoring you. Ever so sorry, I have been in my home country and running around like a crazy person for the past couple of weeks.

Soooo... Let's treat the issue of Conflict Gold..
You may well have heard of conflict diamonds, but not of conflict gold. It's a similar principle with a different commodity.

In certain corrupted African countries, gold is being mined and the profit is used to fund their corrupt governments and conflicts.

 Hence, why it is called Conflict Gold. Now, this in principle means that it is banned from the markets. All gold has to have a registered point of origin, and if it is from these places it should not be used... However, with this come massive ethical issues. 

What are you on about?

Well... Often the gold mining is the only form of income for this remote areas, despite the workers only being paid a pittance. If you take away this income from the people, they won't have anything and they will be far worse off than if they mined the gold. 
They would not be able to afford food, clothes, school, transport etc. And thus the whole community would diminish back to a poorer state. And if you think about that, that isn't fair either, finally there is a way for these areas to flourish, at least a little bit, in developing countries.  When so much of what we do is about trying to help these developing countries, it doesn't seem right to take this away from the people living there.

And then you go back to the flipside:
The gold is funding conflicts, conflicts are bad and often have child soldiers involved in them. The governments are corrupt and totalitarian, so why on earth should we support a government that does such things? 

And that is exactly the question we face now, what matters more? Helping the people and their communities grow, or preventing the governments from funding their conflicts?