Yesterday the Securities and Exchange Commission hosted a public roundtable to discuss the Commission’s rulemaking efforts under Section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank Act, addressing conflict mineral disclosure.
The Commission originally proposed rules to implement Section 1502 in December 2010, and then extended the rule’s comment period through March 2011.
To date, the Commission has received nearly 26,000 form comment letters supporting conflict mineral disclosure, over 265 individual comment letters of various types and has logged over 90 meeting with interested individuals and organizations.
The Commission is once again opening the comment period, through November 1, 2011, and soliciting comments on the various issues discussed at yesterday’s roundtable (a webcast of which is available here).
Chuck Blakeman 
Our Congo-based company works with Congolese tribes to help
them export without a dime going to conflict groups. Dodd-Frank has been
disastrous for them.
I challenge the supporters to take a poll of those they are
supposedly trying to protect. The response would tell them that, while
Dodd-Frank was well-meaning, it is an unmitigated disaster in practice. COCABI,
COMIMPA and COMIDER represent 20,000 miners in the conflict area. They all say they’ve never even been
contacted.
While all the NGOs and politicians are quoting each other’s
support of this, we are quoting chiefs and tribes who are actually being
affected by it, all of whom say it has been disastrous for them and their
livelihood. Doesn’t this say
something very powerful to us?
Also, there are six regions from which Dodd-Frank minerals
are mined, and only one of them has ever had anything to do with conflict.
Dodd-Frank has put them all out of business before it is even enacted. The World Bank says it has negatively
affected 10 million Congolese. If
all Congo minerals came from criminals, then Dodd-Frank would make sense. But the fact is that probably 1-3% of
the affected minerals come from criminals, the rest are from honest,
hard-working chiefs and their tribes, all of whom have lost their only source
of income in the second poorest country on earth.
I was in Tanzania a few weeks ago to help a chief export his
coltan using a visible, well-documented process that ensures not a dime goes to
conflict. His people will go hungry because the smelters, citing Dodd-Frank,
have vanished. The chief is devastated, as are the millions who find their
meager livelihoods destroyed by this over-reaching act.
The issue with Dodd-Frank is that it is a nuclear option
that demonizes minerals instead of criminals. It’s no different than burning down every house in town to
stop a burglar from stealing, who will simply steal from somewhere else. Ludicrous.
Dodd-Frank has burned down the entire mining industry in the
Congo in hopes that their scorched earth policy will catch a militia group in
its path. They are willing to take
down every innocent man, woman, and child who live off mining. Such massive
collateral damage is not acceptable under any circumstance.
Remove mining from the equation and the militia will exact
its pound of flesh from the locals by other means. This should be handled by
targeting militias, not mining. Dodd-Frank takes the route of universal
collateral damage, which, before the bill is enacted, has already destroyed the
livelihoods of the innocents who depend on it.
As Eric Kajemba, the leader of a Congolese civil-society
group has said, “If the advocacy groups aren’t speaking for the people of
eastern Congo, whom are they speaking for?”