cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/41273123

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• The future of European energy and military security depends on secure and diversified sources of critical minerals. Currently, however, the EU heavily relies on supply from China—its strategic rival.
• Direct sourcing from African countries presents an alternative. But after a long history of seeing minerals simply extracted and exported, African governments are keen to keep more stages of mineral processing and manufacturing, known as value addition, on home soil.
• The EU has signed critical mineral agreements with several African countries, yet progress on local value addition projects has been slow. And while African countries have ambitious agendas to produce consumer goods, EU authorities see Africa’s role as more limited to mineral processing.
• To help realise their ambitions, African governments are imposing export restrictions on unprocessed minerals. But to make local value addition economically viable and attractive for foreign investment, more on-the-ground reforms and investments are needed.
• To be better partners, Europeans should make policy adjustments to encourage European participation in African mineral value chains. In a sector crowded with other powers, most notably China, a genuine commitment to supporting local value addition in African partner countries will make the European offer stand out.

Despite possessing around one-third of the world’s mineral resources, African countries have little to show from decades of mining. From Europe to America, China to the Gulf, global powers have taken huge volumes of valuable minerals from Africa to power their own industrial growth. In Zambia, for example, after nearly a century of copper production, the country’s industrial capabilities are still largely limited to producing copper wires and cables. Similar stories echo across the continent: between 2016 and 2022, 73% of the announced greenfield foreign direct investment (FDI) projects in sub-Saharan Africa went towards extraction. Only 26% were for processing and manufacturing.

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Burgeoning global demand for critical minerals has given African governments leverage to change this. They are now pushing to unlock more domestic value addition: the more stages of mineral processing that happen locally, the more their economies can industrialise.

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