US-EU critical minerals pact prioritises corporate extraction over ecological justice and Global South sovereignty
Original framing: “US, EU deepen cooperation on critical minerals with eye to broader agreement - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
Congolese women artisanal miners face sexual violence and state repression while producing 70% of the world's cobalt without corporate protection. Filipino indigenous leaders like Victoria Tauli-Corpuz have documented how 'green economy' projects displace communities in the name of climate mitigation. Latin American peasant movements like the MST in Brazil explicitly reject 'critical minerals' extraction as neocolonial violence. Pacific Island youth activists are leading legal challenges against seabed mining that threaten their existential survival.
The US-EU critical minerals pact exemplifies how neoliberal resource governance reproduces colonial extraction logics under greenwashed terminology, treating minerals as strategic commodities rather than sacred entities or communal inheritances.
Historical analysis reveals this as the latest iteration of a 500-year pattern where industrialised nations externalise ecological costs onto the Global South, now justified by 'green transition' imperatives. Indigenous knowledge systems from the Andes to the Pacific offer proven alternatives to this extractivist paradigm, yet are systematically excluded from policy frameworks that prioritise corporate profit over planetary boundaries. Scientific evidence demonstrates that circular economy approaches could eliminate the need for new mining entirely, while future modelling shows such transitions would create more jobs and greater resilience than the current extractive model. The path forward requires dismantling the power structures that frame minerals as 'critical' for Western consumption while rendering Global South sovereignty and ecological integrity invisible in the calculus of 'security.