Countries like the UK are seeking more trade agreements to gain unfettered access to those parts of green technology supply chains they cannot onshore, such as critical minerals like lithium, cobalt and copper. This functions to externalise the severe human and ecological costs of critical mineral mining to those lands and communities already most impacted by the climate crisis.
Weaponising
These metals and minerals are a crux around which a new dual world turns: trade liberalisation imposed on the resource-rich poor, while major powers can exempt themselves from it. But a new status quo has not yet taken hold.
Some countries in the global south are taking a stand, deciding to control the terms of access to their mineral reserves: Indonesia banning raw material exports to grow local processing, Mexico nationalising its lithium sector, Panama shutting a copper mine that caused outrage over land grabs and ecological destruction.
In response, rich countries are weaponising trade rules to lock poorer, resource-rich countries into their role as raw material exporters, rather than coordinating just and equitable global governance over the resources we all need to face the global climate challenge.
To safeguard the latter, the very real mechanisms of a colonial, extractive logic and corporate capture of the ‘green transition’ need exposing in their trade deal cocoons.
We need to push back against the same old provisions that have historically decimated the infant industries of poorer countries – banning export restrictions, subsidies, local content requirements – being included in the new critical mineral agreements our governments are seeking, which bar use of the same policy tools they are using to home-grown green industries.
Dispossession
We need to force our governments to scrap ISDS in all agreements, that beyond blocking fossil phase-outs are now being used by mining giants to deter or punish countries seeking resource sovereignty and make corporations the sole profiteers from transition.
And we need to address intellectual property rules that mean countries having to pay a ransom to rich patent owners to access critical green technologies.
Disarming trade must go hand in hand with other major economic transformations, of tax, debt, finance. Simply better distributing the benefits of critical mineral mining will only go so far in addressing local elite capture, ecological harm and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples’ land.
But taking the teeth out of new agreements on the horizon will help level the global playing field and force imperative conversations about demand-side solutions in countries like the UK, such as a massive reduction in material use, energy efficiency, a mobility revolution and a circular economy.
There is real stuff to dismantle in the global economy, through its webs of trade rules, to make space for these radical ecological futures.
This Author
Cleodie Rickard is a policy and campaigns manager at Global Justice Now.
