Demand for PlayStation 2 helped fuel African PlayStation War

According to a new report from Toward Freedom, the PlayStation 2’s requirement of a metal called Tantalum helped fuel a war that caused the deaths of several million in the Congo. This event was labeled as the PlayStation War. Story in the full article.

It feels like the plot for the sequel of Syriana, but let’s not fool ourselves. This is real. According to a report from Toward Freedom, high demand of the PlayStation 2 back in 2000 helped fuel a war in Africa that resulted in several million dead.

The war was over a rare metal called coltan, which is needed to make the element Tantalum. Tantalum is used to make many kinds of technology, from cell phones to laptops. It is mostly desired for its capacity to withstand extreme heat, and so is used in producing capacitors.

In today’s hunger for technology, demand for coltan became not unlike oil. The demand is just as high, the stakes just as vicious. From the beginning of 1999 to the beginning of 2001, the world price for tantalum shot from US$ 49 a pound to US$ 275 a pound. To acquire the coltan needed to make tantalum, the Rwandan army seized coltan mines, resulting in countless dead. Prisoners-of-war and children were also made to mine for the metal.

Sony‘s PlayStation 2, it is reported, was largely responsible for the huge increase in demand for coltan. It must be said though, that companies are usually unaware of where they get their material, as researcher David Barouski explains:

Sony and other companies like it, have the benefit of plausible deniability because the coltan ore trades hands so many times from when it is mined to when Sony gets a processed product, that a company often has no idea where the original coltan ore came from, and frankly donÂ’t care to know. But statistical analysis shows it to be nearly inconceivable that Sony made all its PlayStations without using Congolese coltan.

While Sony still uses tantalum for some of its parts, they have taken steps to prevent using coltan that was illegally mined in the Congo:

[The PlayStation 2, PSP, and PlayStation 3] are manufactured mostly from independent parts and components that manufacturers procured externally. The material suppliers source their original material from multiple mines in various countries.

It is therefore hard for us to know what the supply chain mix is. I am happy to state to you that to the best of our knowledge, (SONY) is not using the material about which you have expressed concern.

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Via Toward Freedom