Western nations have sufficient reserves to decouple from China but mining those deposits at a market profit won’t be easy
Over the coming years, Western countries will require tremendous volumes of critical minerals given the demand for mineral-rich technologies like electric vehicle batteries.
A popular policy proposal for supplying and de-risking this mineral demand in industrialized Western countries is “friendshoring,” where partner countries source extracted minerals from each other instead of relying on geopolitical adversaries, namely China.
For example, Australia and the European Union recently signed a memorandum of understanding to increase collaboration and investment in critical mineral supply chains.
In this article’s context, “the West” encompasses countries part of the Mineral Security Partnership—that is, Australia, Canada, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Norway, South Korea, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United States and nations in the European Union.
For the rest of this column: https://asiatimes.com/2024/06/can-the-west-friendshore-enough-critical-minerals/