The recent economic, Covid and geopolitical crises, coupled with the aims of the battle against climate change and the stakes involved, have substantially intensified the concerns of the European Union and its member states over their supply chains for certain products and materials. Though the first EU list of so-called critical materials dates to 2011, concerns over access to resources go back further than that, as Emmanuel Hache reminds us at the beginning of this article, particularly in the USA. Nevertheless, the increasingly shrill alarms over planetary limits and the specific needs of the key sectors of the ecological and digital transitions confer a highly strategic role on various minerals, metals and materials, most of which are produced outside Europe. These strategic raw materials, which are indispensable for the current transitions, could shake things up internationally and are at the heart of the EU’s thinking in terms of industrial sovereignty and a low-carbon development trajectory.
Hache shines a light on this ‘mineral insecurity’ with a very clear situational analysis of the supply conditions for these strategic raw materials and the EU’s level of dependency. He stresses ‘how fragmented the world has become’ and the way trade is organized between the countries that produce and consume these critical materials: the new alliances, the related risks and advantages, the environmental and social challenges around strategic mineral exploitation, and a number of elements that have not yet been properly thought through (such as voluntary self-restraint). Lastly, he suggests four scenarios for how the EU’s attitude to this insecurity of supply may evolve, depending, on the one hand, on the social acceptability of mining projects on its own territory and, on the other, on the degree of cartelization of the global market for raw materials.
