That'S incredibly cynical. It's also just wrong. Children are used as slaves / cheap labor. Without that possibility, they would have to hire adults and pay the

That'S incredibly cynical. It's also just wrong. Children are used as slaves / cheap labor. Without that possibility, they would have to hire adults and pay them more. The additional costs would easily be absorbed by the consumers of rare earths – these make up only a tiny fraction of the cost of the products they are used in. The adults would have better-paying jobs. It's not a 1:1 relationship but considering the positive effects on the local economy this would have, we can simply it as such: these are the parents of those children. They have more money and can feed them And then there's the fact that food is dirt cheap and we could easily feed (cloth, educate, vaccinate) every child on earth given enough political will. I'm usually of the view that the political problems in those countries have to be solved locally and that the "global North" has only limited influence. But verifying that resources are created without child labor, especially if they originate from a limited number of large operations, seems both doable and extremely worthwhile.