Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo will next week ask tech giant Apple to invest directly in sustainable tin mining, a senior cabinet minister told Reuters. The President will travel to Washington and San Francisco on a five-day trip starting 25 October in the hope of attracting much-needed foreign investment to revive growth in Southeast Asia’s largest economy. Jokowi plans to visit Apple’s headquarters and have dinner with CEO Tim Cook to discuss investment in Indonesia’s tin industry to ensure the metal used in iPhones and other Apple products is produced in legal mines.
“Apple wants to invest … in the tin industry in Bangka-Belitung,” Chief Security Minister Luhut Pandjaitan, who will accompany Jokowi on the trip, told Reuters. “They want to get the tin directly from the source”. Green groups have accused Apple of sourcing tin from suppliers that use child workers and violate environmental laws. Apple says it does not tolerate underage labour and is dedicated to the ethical sourcing of minerals. Other appointments reported to be on Jokowi’s itinerary include US President Barack Obama, other tech giants Google, Facebook and Microsoft and copper-gold miner Freeport McMoRan.
ITRI View: The initiative appears to be a follow-up Jokowi’s first direct involvement in tin after a visit to Bangka-Belitung province in June this year. At a press conference at that time he stressed the potential role of major companies in helping to formalize small-scale mining activity, which has dominated the country’s tin sector for 15 years. “We have to control illegal tin businesses. Smaller scale people’s mines should be managed by their ‘step fathers’ namely private firms and state companies”, he said. Direct investment in tin by an important downstream user could be an interesting accompaniment to ongoing efforts at tighter government regulation of the sector.
