Tariffs, child miners and the cost of outsourcing the dirty work.
When the Trump administration imposed tariffs on Chinese imports, the headlines focused on big-picture economics: steel jobs in Pennsylvania, trade wars with Beijing, American manufacturing on life support.
But few considered how those same policies might ripple through to a cobalt pit in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where a 12-year-old boy with a pickaxe earns less than $2 a day.
That’s the problem with global supply chains: they’re long, complex, and deeply unequal. We’ve outsourced not just manufacturing, but the dirtiest and most dangerous parts of our economy — and the consequences of our policies often fall hardest on those furthest from the negotiating table.
Tariffs are designed to impose costs on foreign producers. But those producers — say, Chinese firms that refine cobalt for tech companies — don’t simply swallow those costs. They pass them on. Sometimes, that means squeezing the upstream suppliers: the artisanal miners in the DRC, digging cobalt out by hand, often without protection, rights, or representation.
Other times, tariffs reduce demand altogether. If US companies buy fewer batteries or electronics due to rising costs, demand for cobalt drops — and with it, the already-precarious incomes of those same miners.
This isn’t a simple case of “tariffs are bad.” There are legitimate debates to be had about trade, national resilience, and the future of manufacturing. But what we can’t ignore is this: interventions made in the name of economic justice at home can cause economic harm abroad — especially to the most vulnerable.
Economist Milton Friedman often warned that government policies, however well-intentioned, carry unintended consequences. Distort one part of the system, and another part bends — or breaks. Markets, he argued, send signals through prices. When we interfere with those signals, the consequences are rarely local. They ripple outward, often invisibly.
Today, those ripples reach the DRC.
If we care about human rights, we can’t just focus on domestic headlines or feel-good policies. We have to trace the consequences — all the way to the margins. To the mines. To the kids. To the places where price pressure becomes life pressure.
Because the question isn’t just, “Did the tariff work?”
It’s also, “Who paid the price?”
Aside from his consulting work alongside great charitable organisations, you may be interested to know about Mark Preston’s work to shine a light on the unjust artisanal mining practices that lie hidden from sight but generate large amounts of minerals for our phones, laptops and TVs. You can read all about this work by hitting this link to the Freedom and Justice Partnership.