This article is more than 1 year old

Apple's DIRTY SECRET isn't that secret, or that dirty

Indonesia’s tin mining issues aren't the fruity firm’s fault, guys. Move on

Comment We've had another instalment in the campaign to blame Apple for all that goes wrong in poor countries, and this time it was the BBC's Panorama that scolded the iFruit for buying tin in Indonesia.

Not appreciably different from The Guardian's story of 25 months ago. Not really all that different from various Friends of the Earth productions. Perhaps we should really be grateful that the PR office waited those 25 months to recycle the story.

The basic background is that lots of the world's tin comes from the Indonesian Bangka-Belitung islands, where there is much illegal mining and the employment of children. Apple buys some of that tin, and therefore it's up to Apple to improve matters. Oh, and some of the mining destroys corals.

There's a certain problem with this narrative it should be said. The first might be on the definition of what illegal actually is here. This isn't like the slavery and rapine over in the Congo at all: this is desperately poor people going in and stealing someone else's ore by digging it up.

They then sell it to the smelters who make the actual tin. Yes, theft is property and all that: but to say that it's Apple's either problem or fault that poor people are stealing from the Indonesian state (which rightly owns the minerals in question) seems a little much. And like many criminal enterprises this work is done under less than rigorous safety standards.

I'd also note (and I do actually know this company, have dealt with it in a professional capacity) that it's the state-owned smelter often buying the ore off the thieves.

And even after that, tin can only be exported from Indonesia through a state-owned monopoly: people I also know. To hold Apple, or any other tech giant that happens to use tin-based solder (all of them) responsible for what's happening at the bottom here seems rather harsh. Why not critique the government itself?

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