One of the blogs I frequent just had a piece on companies trying to trace their supply chain all the way to the source. This initiative is because of changes in the law which require them to determine if they are using conflict minerals. The authors mentioned that the total costs of trying to be compliant with the new law has been about 709 million dollars and 6 million staff hours (and that only 24% of the companies are actually fully compliant so far).
709 million dollars is a lot of money, and I wondered if a) it might have been more effective to put it directly into aid, and b) how that number compared to the actual value of conflict minerals. From this link though, it looks like the reforms have been a lot more effective than I initially expected. The "enough project" estimated that in 2008 (prior to the new law) 185 million dollars went to armed groups via conflict minerals. They also attribute a lot of the progress since then to the law. This source estimates that revenues have decreased by 65%. They do think that some of the violent groups have shifted focus to gold since conflict gold hasn't suffered in value nearly as much as the other conflict minerals.
In short, while tracing an entire supply chain is incredibly costly, the law has been pretty effective at improving the situation.
709 million dollars is a lot of money, and I wondered if a) it might have been more effective to put it directly into aid, and b) how that number compared to the actual value of conflict minerals. From this link though, it looks like the reforms have been a lot more effective than I initially expected. The "enough project" estimated that in 2008 (prior to the new law) 185 million dollars went to armed groups via conflict minerals. They also attribute a lot of the progress since then to the law. This source estimates that revenues have decreased by 65%. They do think that some of the violent groups have shifted focus to gold since conflict gold hasn't suffered in value nearly as much as the other conflict minerals.
In short, while tracing an entire supply chain is incredibly costly, the law has been pretty effective at improving the situation.
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