The Economics of Poverty

useless to a person stranded on a desert island without water, the piles of natural resources in the Democratic Republic of the Congo are not very meaningful given that there is very little stability and confidence in the country itself.

At the most fundamental level, this is what that looks like.

This is a diamond mine in Canada.

It is a huge industrial facility that utilizes modern machinery and technology to extract these resources very efficiently.

Mines like this employ thousands of workers in very high paying jobs and generate huge profit for the companies running these operations, which they should given the hundreds of millions of dollars in investment that goes into building facilities like these.

Conversely, this is a diamond mine in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

No rational investor would ever put the same amount of money into a mine here because there is very little confidence that their investments would not be claimed by corruption and so much instability that having a mine stolen by any number of the civil conflicts is a very real possibility.

Because of this lack of investment, workers are reduced to using hand tools and very, very basic machinery.

This means that despite the abundance of resources, they are not extracted with the same efficiency and do not generate nearly as much money as a properly developed industrial mine.

This issue is made even worse by the fact that the only groups that are willing and able to run and confidently hold these mines are operating military powers who have often stooped to using child labour to extract these resources.

Feist did a fantastic documentary on this, and I'll leave a link to that in the description below.

But, needless to say, the revenue from the sale of these crudely extracted resources is not going to build schools and infrastructure, but rather guns and tanks, furthering the horrendous violence plaguing this nation.