Artisanal Miners, Likasi - Washington Post Video Clip

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/video/2008/04/23/VI2008042303044.html

Scenes from the brutal conditions of an artisinal mining camp outside of Likasi, Congo. A man in sunglasses known as the negotiante, who swindles the diggers out of money for their ore and is "snake-hearted," according to them, shows his day's stash.

Across Congo, Freelance Miners Dig In Against Modern Industry

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/23/AR2008042303509.html

Washington Post Stephanie McCrummen

An estimated 2 million people across Congo are part of a brutal business known as artisanal mining, which accounts for as much as 90 percent of the country's mineral exports. It is a scrappy, outside-the-law means of making a living. The haphazard tunneling undermines the stability of the earth above, which often collapses. Every week, about 10 miners die in accidents, provincial officials said. and one increasingly at odds with the modern mining industry that the Congolese government is trying to build as the backbone of a formal economy. But artisanal mining is a fairly recent phenomenon in Congo, where miners for decades were a privileged minority in an impoverished country, enjoying something resembling a middle-class life.

The diggers usually work in groups of three, heaving out bags of ore. A three-man team can produce perhaps two 220-pound sacks of copper ore a day, a bounty quickly consumed by a slew of dubious taxes, fees and prices. After those costs, each miner ends the day with about $4, perhaps a fifth of the value of one 220-pound sack. The going rate for a decent loaf of bread is $1.50. The diggers are not the only ones suffering in such transactions. Congo is also losing out on taxes and jobs as the less-valuable raw ore is hauled out of the country before being processed into a final product worth four times as much. Yet because the artisanal system is so economically entrenched and accepted -- a billboard in the provincial capital shows a digger chatting on a cellphone -- people here say it will be difficult to uproot.