Billions of dollars are being pumped into a global critical minerals boom, as the resources are increasingly wielded as trade weapons and countries race to plug their supply-chain vulnerabilities.
And resource-rich countries are eager to come out on top.
Producer countries want “to take maximum advantage of this moment,” said Geoffrey Pyatt, who served as assistant secretary of state for energy resources in the Biden administration.
It’s an all-too familiar story for many of the world’s mineral-rich powers—such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Bolivia, and South Africa—which have been flooded by interest before and carry fraught legacies of extraction and exploitation.
“Resource-rich countries have been used as extractive giants,” said Heidi Crebo-Rediker, who was the U.S. State Department’s first chief economist under the Obama administration and is currently at the Council on Foreign Relations. Many “have not seen the benefits of the extraction of many resources over many decades,” she said.
