On October 9, 2025, China’s commerce ministry announced export controls on the technology used to mine and process rare earths. Three weeks later, on the day Xi Jinping met Donald Trump in South Korea, the ministry froze the measures for one year. The pause covered only the October measures, and the licensing introduced in April 2025 for seven medium and heavy rare earths stayed in force.

Congo moved first, with cobalt. It suspended exports in February 2025 to lift prices that had fallen to nine-year lows, and in October it replaced the ban with quotas. By April 2026 the metal had risen 160% since February 2025 to $26 a pound.

Most commentary reads these moves as turns in a contest between two coalitions. The contest is real, yet it leaves out the question of who captures the value of critical minerals. The countries that hold the ore and the countries that set the terms of trade are often different countries, and that gap raises a problem of justice. Critical minerals will test whether justice has borders.

Why Critical Minerals Supply Lags Demand

Geologists Martin Reich and Adam Simon of the Universidad de Chile and the University of Michigan trace the shortage of critical minerals to rock. Copper, nickel, cobalt, lithium, and rare earth elements (17 metals, used among other things in electric-motor magnets) occur in a few kinds of deposit, and new mines face long permitting and infrastructure delays. Future demand, they write, could outpace expected mine production.

Criticality itself shifts with demand. A mineral is critical when it matters to important technologies and its supply is easy to disrupt. In the U.S. Department of Energy matrix the authors reproduce, lithium and nickel move from near-critical for 2020 to 2025 to critical for 2025 to 2035, and copper moves from noncritical to near-critical. The label “critical minerals” responds to demand and politics as well as to geology.

Cobalt, Nickel, and Copper Show the Gap

Cobalt shows the problem most clearly. Almost all of it comes as a by-product of copper or nickel mining, so its output follows demand for those metals and cannot be raised much in response to cobalt demand alone. Congo supplies about 75% of the world’s cobalt. Mines produced 215,000 tonnes in 2023, and demand is forecast to reach 344,000 tonnes in 2030. Low-cobalt and cobalt-free batteries are already slowing long-term demand growth.

Nickel and copper show gaps of their own. Nickel demand is projected at 4.7 million tonnes in 2035, against mine output of about 4 million tonnes a year through 2040. A world with fully electrified vehicles and all electricity from wind and solar power backed by grid batteries would need 91 million tonnes of mined copper a year by 2050, a level the authors say seems unattainable.

Company reports point to 21 to 23.5 million tonnes of copper in 2030. The years differ, so the figures indicate direction only. The authors also warn that a poorly managed transition can leave marginalized communities, health problems, and biodiversity loss in its wake.

Who Mines and Who Refines

The sharper constraint on critical minerals sits downstream. Vlado Vivoda, Ron Matthews, and Neil McGregor tabulate who mines and who refines in a Resources Policy article. China mines 1.3% of the world’s cobalt and refines 76% of it. It mines 4.8% of the nickel and refines 30.2%. For rare earths the figures are 70% and 87%, and China also refines 58% of lithium and 42% of copper.

A country that refines what it does not mine holds a position that ore alone does not give. A country that mines what it cannot refine owns a resource that others turn into products and profit. Control of supply and ownership of the ore have come apart, and cobalt shows the widest gap.

A country that mines what it cannot refine owns a resource that others turn into products and profit.

The authors frame the contest over critical minerals as one between two groupings. The Minerals Security Partnership, launched in June 2022 by the United States and its allies, includes Australia, Canada, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. Its counterpart is the enlarged BRICS group (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, plus new members). In the authors’ table, the Western group’s share of rare earth refining is 1%.

The two groupings differ sharply in weight. In the same table the partnership’s members hold 13.8% of the world’s population and 54.9% of its nominal output. The enlarged BRICS group holds 46.2% of the population and 28.9% of the output.

The partnership’s blueprint divides labor. Mineral-rich Australia and Canada would focus on extraction, and processing would go to technologically advanced nations such as the United States, Japan, and South Korea. Both extractors are wealthy countries. The question the blueprint leaves open is what a poorer producer would receive in the same division.

Producers Outside the Two Blocs

The authors call seven countries outside both groupings battlegrounds for control of critical minerals: Chile, Peru, Congo, Mozambique, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Kazakhstan. Indonesia mines 48% of the world’s nickel and refines 25%. Chile mines 30% of the lithium and refines 29%, a near-match between the two stages. For these states, the strategic question is how much processing and price they can capture.

The newer bloc buys access. Saudi Arabia, which the authors count among the new BRICS entrants, agreed to pay US$2.6 billion for a 10% stake in Vale’s base metals business in Brazil to reach nickel and copper. Chinese companies, they add, have invested in lithium extraction in Chile and Argentina and in nickel production in Indonesia.

Membership lists also proved unstable. The authors expected Argentina, which they describe as leading the world with 13 lithium projects in development, to join BRICS on January 1, 2024. Argentina’s government instead wrote to decline the invitation, South Africa’s foreign minister said that January.

Producers Begin to Set the Terms

Congo’s quotas work as a price instrument. The regulator set the 2026 cap at 87,000 tonnes of cobalt contained in hydroxide, and in August 2026 its chairman said the cap could be cut if the market’s imbalance worsens. The same report notes weak battery demand in China and lower cobalt prices. In late June 2026 the regulator also announced that unused first-half quotas would be forfeited and reassigned to a state-controlled strategic quota.

The lever has limits. Congo can restrict cobalt faster than it can make more, because cobalt follows copper and nickel output. A government that withholds a by-product bets that buyers lack alternatives for long enough, and the battery chemistries noted above show that alternatives exist.

China’s lever works at the other end of the chain. Its refineries process up to 90% of the world’s rare earths. Outside China, MP Materials and USA Rare Earth are building mining and processing in the United States, and Lynas and Iluka are expanding refining in Australia. The one-year pause was meant, according to an analyst note, to give such capacity time to grow.

What Rawls and Pogge Would Say About Mineral Wealth

In The Law of Peoples, John Rawls held that the uneven distribution of natural resources among countries raises no difficulty of justice, because the decisive element in how a country fares is its political culture. He accepted a duty to assist societies burdened by unfavorable political and economic conditions.

Thomas Pogge answers in World Poverty and Human Rights that the global institutional order itself produces injustice. He describes a resource privilege: whoever holds effective power in a country may sell its resources, and importing states recognize the seller as legitimate. He proposes a global resources dividend as a remedy.

Michael Ross supplies evidence in The Oil Curse. Oil-rich countries, he finds, are 50% more likely to be ruled by autocrats and twice as likely to descend into civil war as countries without oil. His data concern petroleum, and whether cobalt or lithium behave the same way remains an open question.

Critical minerals give the dispute a test case in Congo’s quota. If Rawls is right, the decisive variable is how well Congo governs itself. If Pogge is right, the problem is the rule that lets whoever controls the territory sell the ore, and a quota is a crude attempt to rewrite it. Choosing between them requires knowing how the revenue is spent, and the sources reviewed here do not report that.

A Three-Question Test for Mineral Deals

A useful test for any minerals agreement, whether it comes from the Minerals Security Partnership, BRICS, or a single buyer, asks three questions about critical minerals. The test is this essay’s own proposal, and none of the sources above states it.

• Who processes? Does the agreement leave the producing country a path from ore to refined product, or does it fix the country as a quarry?
• Who sets the price? Does the producer take part in setting it, or does it receive whatever the refiner’s market pays?
• Who answers for harm? Are protections for mining communities and the environment enforceable, and do citizens share in the revenue as well as rulers?

The test gives uneven results on the cases above. The partnership’s blueprint, as the authors describe it, envisions processing in the United States, Japan, and South Korea, so a producer outside that group answers the first question with a quarry. Congo’s quotas answer the second by giving it a say over price, and the third stays open. China’s licensing shows the first question from the other side: whoever controls processing controls what it will sell.

Shiquan Dou, Deyi Xu, Yongguang Zhu, and Rodney Keenan reach a related conclusion in a review in the journal Futures. They call mineral extraction a double-edged sword, because it can damage the environment and society, and they say the international community should respect the demands of resource countries for equitable development. They suggest a global governance mechanism for critical minerals to coordinate the interests of all parties.

Three Objections to the Test

The strongest objection comes from Rawls’s side. Producing governments can mismanage revenue, and terms that favor them may never reach their citizens. That is the reason for the third question: a deal that enriches an unaccountable ruler passes the first two and fails the test. Ross’s findings on oil show the risk.

A second objection is speed. Buyers racing to secure supply will trade fairness for time, and the shortage rewards them for it. Terms accepted under pressure invite renegotiation, though. Congo’s quotas and China’s licenses show that a producer with leverage will use it, and a buyer that ignored the producer’s interests at signing will face them again at renewal.

A third objection predicts that the shortage will ease. Recycling, efficiency gains, and new battery chemistries could cut demand for particular metals, and low-cobalt batteries already slow the growth of cobalt demand. The projections cited above still all point upward, and a metal that is scarce for even a decade gives its holder leverage during that decade.

The comparison between Chile and Indonesia, and the record of producers that restrict exports, will show whether governance at home or rules abroad does more to decide how far up the chain a producer climbs. Each new agreement can be put to the three questions while that evidence accumulates. Critical minerals will keep drawing the blocs together and apart, and the agreements that last will be the ones the producers have reason to renew.