Home >  Nation & World >  World News

Monday, June 24, 2002

By Joan Lowy, Scripps Howard News Service

The worldwide surge in the popularity of cell phones and other consumer electronics may be contributing to the near extermination of a type of gorilla found only in the rain forests of one country in central Africa.

	An eastern lowland gorilla. Refugees from strife in Congo have taken up the mining of coltan in the gorilla's habitat, and are killing the animals for food. (Chris Martin Bahr, World Wildlife Fund)

Four years ago, an estimated 17,000 eastern lowland gorillas -- one of three subspecies of gorilla -- lived in the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire. Today, international conservationists estimate that 80 percent to 90 percent of the gorillas have been killed and only 2,000 to 3,000 of the animals may be left in the wild.

The reason for the slaughter is coltan, a mineral used in the manufacture of electronic capacitors used in computers, automobiles and other products. Cell phones use more of the world's production of capacitors than any other product.

As the number of cell-phone subscribers exploded, the spot market price of coltan soared from $30 a pound to $445 a pound two years ago, touching off a worldwide scramble for the ore.

Most of the world's coltan comes from mines in Australia, Canada and Brazil, but there are abundant reserves in the Congo, including large amounts just below the earth's surface in wildlife preserves that are critical habitat for gorillas, elephants and other endangered species.

Thousands of villagers displaced by years of civil war and violence between rebel factions within the Congo have poured into the 2,300-square-mile Kahuzi-Biega National Park to mine coltan, using nothing more than shovels.

With no infrastructure in the rainforest to supply food to the miners, poachers slaughtered any large animal they could find to eat, including gorillas and elephants.

Before the coltan mining rush, Kahuzi-Biega was home to 80 percent of all eastern lowland gorillas. Today, conservationists believe there may not be any gorillas left in park lowland areas. Even outside the park, coltan mining and war have taken a toll on gorillas.

"If the limited evidence is verified, then it really has been a major catastrophe for this subspecies of gorilla," said Ian Redmond, a British wildlife consultant.

Conservationists can't enter key regions where gorillas normally live to determine the full extent of the slaughter or the degree to which mining is continuing because the areas are controlled by "very well organized gangs of bad guys with guns," Redmond said.

Redmond was in the mountainous portion of Kahuzi-Biega that includes about 10 percent of the park in March. At that time, poachers in the park lowlands were still going out to hunt, he said, but were returning only with smaller game.

The fear is that gorillas and elephants have been so widely slaughtered that hunters can no longer find them, Redmond said.

Since last summer, the price of coltan has dropped to as low as $100 a pound on the spot market and as low as $60 a pound under contract directly with suppliers.

The price drop is due partly to overstocking of coltan by manufacturers and to the general slump in computer and other high-tech industries.

In response to alarms raised by conservationists, capacitor manufacturers have also made a significant effort to shift their purchases to coltan mined outside Africa. Only one shipment of about 33,000 pounds -- roughly 2 percent of the annual global coltan supply -- mined in the Congo has been sold on the world market this year.

But conservationists said that coltan mining in Kahuzi-Biega is continuing, although at a lower volume, and smugglers are using all their ingenuity to get it out of the Congo and onto the global market.

"It would be a mistake to think the problem is gone," said Dieter Steklis, chief scientist for the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International. "It's continuing to pose extreme threats to eastern lowland gorillas, which have already been decimated."

Eventually, manufacturers will deplete their stocks of coltan, the price will go up again and there will be a resurgence of mining in gorilla habitat.

"As long as people know the stuff is valuable, it's going to get out," Steklis said.