That Nintendo Wii you got for your birthday sure is fun. But it’s also built with the spoils of one of the deadliest wars the world has ever seen. Historically, “conflict minerals” like coltan, tin, tantalum and tungsten, which are pulled from mines in eastern Congo and sold to electronics companies to produce the transistors that power all of our gadgets, have bought guns and bullets for the country’s brutal rebel factions and the Congolese National Army. A recent global effort to shut down the market for conflict minerals, however, looks like it’s working. For the most part.A new report by the Enough Project, an arm of the Center for American Progress, shows that companies like Intel, Apple and Microsoft have been successfully scaling back their use of conflict minerals in their products. Other companies have been less helpful. Out of the 24 companies surveyed and ranked based on their use of conflict minerals, Nintendo came in dead last having made no effort to ensure that its products weren’t funding guerrilla warfare in Africa. “Nintendo is, I believe, the only company that has basically refused to acknowledge the issue or demonstrate they are making any sort of effort on it,” said Sasha Lezhnev from the Enough Project. “And this is despite a good two years of trying to get in contact with them.”Nintendo’s excuse for still supporting the Congolese warlords is a pretty weak one. The company told CNN that it “outsources the manufacture and assembly of all Nintendo products to our production partners and therefore is not directly involved in the sourcing of raw materials that are ultimately used in our products.” Oh, but it’s not like they don’t care about human beings. “We nonetheless take our social responsibilities as a global company very seriously and expect our production partners to do the same,” Nintendo added. They’re evidently not taking these responsibilities as seriously as Intel, Apple and Microsoft, who topped the rankings of companies that have taken the steps recommended by the Enough Project to put a stop to the trafficking of conflict minerals. The Enough Project also assigned a score to each company based on their progress. Intel got a 60. Nintendo got a 0.It might not be long before Nintendo’s forced to pay more attention to the matter, though. The 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law contains a provision requiring publicly traded companies to disclose whether or not their products contain minerals from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where 5.4 million people have been killed — the most in an armed conflict since World War II — since fighting started in 1998. As Alex Pasternack pointed out earlier this year, critics of the policy say that it has brought more harm than good, functioning more like an embargo that has also halted legitimate mining ventures and reduced the Congo’s legal mineral exports by 90%. As the Securities and Exchange Commission prepares to vote to enforce the law, or not, on August 22, major companies are already pulling out of the Congo in anticipation of the new regulation. But not Nintendo.It’s unclear exactly why Nintendo’s sitting this one out, but it’s probably safe to say that the video game veteran is simply watching out for its bottom line. With companies like Sony and Microsoft, both newcomers to the gaming industry, dominating sales of consoles, Nintendo’s been on a steady decline. The company’s revenue declined by 10 percent year-over-year and lost $220 million, its latest earnings report revealed. The minerals needed to build the transistors that go inside our electronics do exist elsewhere in the world, outside of the wartorn areas of the Congo. Because they’re less plentiful, though, they’re also more expensive. But at least they’re not powering a civil war.So the next time you have your pals over for a fun night of Mario Kart, remember what’s inside your Wii. Maybe top it all off with a little screening of the Vice Guide to Congo, you know, just to sober everyone up.
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