Siddharth Kara
Siddharth Kara is an author, researcher, screenwriter, and activist on modern slavery. His most recent book Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives came out this year, on the horrors of cobalt mining in the Congo.
He an adjunct lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and a Visiting Scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health. Kara has written three books on modern slavery: Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery (2009); Bonded Labor: Tackling the System of Slavery in South Asia (2012); and Modern Slavery: A Global Perspective (2017), each with Columbia University Press.
Kara adapted Sex Trafficking into a Hollywood film, Trafficked, which held its world premiere at the United Nations in New York. Sex Trafficking also won the prestigious Frederick Douglass book prize at Yale University for the best non-fiction book on slavery. Kara has also authored the reports: Tainted Carpets: Slavery and Child Labor in India’s Hand-Made Carpet Sector (Harvard, 2014), and Tainted Garments: The Exploitation of Women and Girls in India’s Home-Based Garment Sector (UC Berkeley, 2019).
Across twenty years of almost entirely self-funded research, Kara has traveled to more than fifty countries to document the cases of several thousand slaves of all kinds. He has mapped global human trafficking networks, explored the perilous underground of trafficked sex slaves, and traced global supply chains of numerous commodities tainted by slavery and child labor. Kara advises several UN agencies and numerous governments on anti-slavery policy and law. He has also appeared extensively in the media as an expert on modern slavery, including on CNN, the BBC, the Guardian, CNBC, National Geographic, and numerous documentary films. Previously, Kara was an investment banker at Merrill Lynch, then ran his own finance and M&A consulting firm. He holds a Law degree from England, MBA from Columbia University, and BA from Duke University.
732: Siddharth Kara, part 1: Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives
Living unsustainably means you need resources beyond your immediate environment. It requires you take from others. When done on a cultural level, it’s known as imperialism. When we take their land too, it’s colonialism. When we take their labor, it’s slavery.
All of these things are happening in the Congo. If you think solar and wind are sustainable or avoid human suffering, read Siddharth’s book Cobalt Red. If you listened to my last conversation with Adam Hochschild on his book King Leopold’s Ghost, you know about the west’s cruelty in the Congo. It hasn’t ended. Adam put me in touch with Siddharth.
The book will change your views on what we call clean, green, and renewable. Siddharth doesn’t outright say it, but it seems every rechargeable battery, therefore every phone, electric vehicle, laptop, and so on should be labelled: “Produced with slave labor.”