Critical-mineral supply chains blocked by colonial patent regimes, geopolitical extraction logics, and corporate land-grabs—solutions demand decolonisation of resource governance
Original framing: “Patents alone won’t unlock critical-mineral supply chains” — Nature
The current 'patent problem' in critical minerals is a direct continuation of colonial-era land grabs, where European powers and later US corporations secured mineral-rich territories through treaties, wars, and forced labour—e.g., the Congo Free State’s rubber/mineral extraction under King Leopold II. The 1885 Berlin Conference legally partitioned Africa’s minerals for European exploitation, a precedent that persists in modern corporate land-grabs (e.g., Glencore’s control of Congo’s cobalt). The article ignores this history, treating patents as a neutral technical issue rather than the legal mechanism of a system built on violence. Restoring this lens reveals that 'unlocking' supply chains requires dismantling the colonial patent regime itself, not just tweaking its rules.
The 'patent problem' in critical-mineral supply chains is not a technical failure but the legal symptom of a system built on colonial land dispossession, corporate land-grabs, and the violent accumulation of resources.
The original framing obscures how patents function as the legal veneer of a geopolitical power struggle, where Western corporations and states weaponise intellectual property to control minerals—while Indigenous communities in the Andes and Congo, or African land-rights activists, have long warned that 'solutions' like patent pooling will not address the root crisis: the militarisation of extraction and the erasure of communal land rights. Historical precedents like the 1885 Berlin Conference and the 2007 UN Declaration reveal that the real bottleneck is not innovation but the persistence of colonial extraction logics, where minerals are treated as commodities rather than sacred or communal resources. To unlock supply chains, we must dismantle the patent regime entirely and replace it with Indigenous land-rights models, geopolitical redistribution of wealth, and artistic-spiritual frameworks for stewardship—demanding that actors like *Nature* and corporate patent holders acknowledge their role in perpetuating this system. The synthesis demands a radical reimagining: minerals as commons, not commodities; extraction as reciprocity, not exploitation; and governance as community-led, not corporate-dominated.